Single-source polities
Every citation on these pages resolves to one work. That is not a fault — for several of them one monograph is genuinely most of the modern scholarship — but it is a fact a reader should have before relying on the page.
Baekje18 BC – AD 660, Balhae713–926, Buyeo (Puyŏ)50 BC – AD 17, Gaya Confederacy41–527, Goguryeo37 BC – AD 668, Gojoseon (Old Joseon)2332–106 BC, Goryeo918–1392, Later Baekje897–936, Silla57 BC – AD 935, Taebong905–918 — Homer B. Hulbert, The History of Korea, Volume I (Methodist Publishing House (Seoul), 1905)
Chahamana Dynasty of Ajmer1100–1192, Gahadavala Dynasty of Kanauj1090–1194, Gurjara-Pratihara Empire816–1090, Kanva Empire72–27 BC, Nanda Empire361–322 BC, Sena Dynasty of Bengal1050–1199, Shunga Empire185–72 BC — Vincent A. Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (Clarendon Press, 1904)
The Kenmu Restoration1333–1336, Nanboku-chō (the Southern Court)1336–1392 — William Elliot Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (Harper & Brothers, 1883)
Cao Wei220–265, Jin Empire265–420 — Demetrius Charles Boulger, The History of China (W. Thacker & Co., 1898)
Sultanate of Bengal1338–1538, Sultanate of Gujarat1396–1572, Sharqi Sultanate of Jaunpur1394–1489, Sultanate of Kashmir1339–1586, Sultanate of Malwa1392–1561 — Sir Wolseley Haig (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume III: Turks and Afghans (Cambridge University Press, 1928)
Khanate of Sibir1493–1598 — Henry H. Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part II: The So-Called Tartars of Russia and Central Asia, Division II (Longmans, Green, 1880)
Kingdom of Denmark940–1814, Kingdom of Sweden983–1815 — Jón Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916)
Kingdom of Aragon1035–1479, Kingdom of León and Castile910–1492 — Charles E. Chapman, A History of Spain, Founded on the Historia de España y de la Civilización Española of Rafael Altamira (1918)
Kingdom of Loango1500–1787 — B. A. Ogot (ed.), General History of Africa, Volume V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (UNESCO Publishing / James Currey, 1992)
The House of Austria1273–1499 — William Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)
Kediri under Jayakatwang1292–1293 — Kenneth R. Hall, A History of Early Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and Societal Development, 100-1500 (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011)
Chalukya Empire (Badami)543–753, Kakatiya Dynasty1150–1323 — G. Yazdani (ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (Oxford University Press / Government of Andhra Pradesh, 1960)
The Grand Principality of Moscow1263–1547, Principality of Tver1270–1485, Vladimir-Suzdal1157–1328 — V. O. Kliuchevsky, translated by C. J. Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (J. M. Dent & Sons / E. P. Dutton, 1912)
Northern Zhou557–581, Rouran Khaganate394–552 — Edward Harper Parker, A Thousand Years of the Tartars (Sampson Low, London, 1895)
Chen Dynasty557–589, Liang Dynasty502–557, Liu Song (Southern) Dynasty420–479, Southern Qi Dynasty479–502 — Demetrius Charles Boulger, The History of China, Volume I (W. Thacker & Co., 1881)
Sultanate of Malindi1589–1632, Mazaru'i Mombasa1746–1837, Sultanate of Pate1746–1822 — C. H. Stigand, The Land of Zinj, Being an Account of British East Africa, Its Ancient History and Present Inhabitants (Constable and Company, 1913)
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth1569–1831 — James Fletcher, The History of Poland, from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Harper & Brothers, 1836)
Dzungar Khanate1635–1758, Northern Yuan1368–1635 — Henry H. Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part I: The Mongols Proper and the Kalmuks (Longmans, Green, 1876)
Kingdom of Bohemia872–1620, Great Moravia836–907 — Francis, Count Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920)
The Kingdom of Hungary895–1526, The Principality of Transylvania1541–1691 — Edwin Lawrence Godkin, The History of Hungary and the Magyars, from the Earliest Period to the Close of the Late War (John W. Parker and Son, 1853)
Kingdom of Wessex / England802–1066 — F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, in The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943)
Calakmul623–909, Palenque431–814, Tikal292–869 — Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya (Thames & Hudson, 2008)
Moghulistan1347–1533 — Mirza Muhammad Haidar Dughlat, The Tarikh-i-Rashidi: A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia (Sampson Low, Marston, 1895)
Toltec Empire710–1064 — Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Native Races, Volume 5: Primitive History (A.L. Bancroft & Company, 1875)
Konbaung Dynasty (Alaungpaya Dynasty)1752–1824, Toungoo Dynasty1531–1752 — G. E. Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824, the Beginning of the English Conquest (Longmans, Green and Co., 1925)
Kingdom of Norway872–1814 — Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen and C. F. Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886)
Bahmani Sultanate1347–1526 — Muhammad Qasim Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1829)
Carthage537–146 BC — R. Bosworth Smith, Carthage and the Carthaginians (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1878)
Ganden Phodrang (Dalai Lama's Government)1635–1912 — Charles Bell, Tibet: Past and Present (Clarendon Press, 1924)
Kingdom of Portugal1139–1580 — H. Morse Stephens, The Story of Portugal (1891)
The Grand Duchy of Lithuania1204–1569 — Josef A. Katzel, translated and annotated by Daniel K. Berman, A Short History of Lithuania to 1569: Centennial Edition (1921-2021) (Godot Press, 2021)
Vijayanagara1336–1793 — Robert Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1900)
Kievan Rus'878–1240 — George Vernadsky, Kievan Russia, in A History of Russia, Volume II (Yale University Press, 1948)
Dai Viet under the Ly and the Tran1054–1400 — K. W. Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
The Republic of Novgorod1136–1478 — Translated by Robert Michell and Nevill Forbes, The Chronicle of Novgorod, 1016-1471, in Camden Third Series, Volume XXV (Camden Society / Royal Historical Society, 1914)
Chimor1300–1470 — John Howland Rowe, The Kingdom of Chimor, in Acta Americana, vol. 6 (1948)
Cuman-Kipchak confederation1054–1331 — Alexander Bruce Boswell, The Kipchak Turks (The Slavonic Review, Vol. 6, No. 16, 1927)
Kizzuwatna1550–1390 BC — Andrea Trameri, The Land of Kizzuwatna: History of Cilicia in the Second Millennium BCE until the Hittite Conquest (ca. 2000-1350), in PhD dissertation, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University (2020)
Dai Viet under the Later Le1428–1788 — Trương Vĩnh Ký, Cours d'histoire annamite à l'usage des écoles de la Basse-Cochinchine (Imprimerie du Gouvernement, 1875)
Pallava Dynasty200–897 — R. Gopalan, History of the Pallavas of Kanchi (University of Madras, 1928)
The Kingdom of Pegu (Hanthawaddy)1287–1539 — G. E. Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824 (Longmans, Green and Co., 1925)
Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Iroquois League)1450–1848 — Lewis Henry Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (Sage & Brother, 1851)
Principality of Wales1255–1282 — Sir John Edward Lloyd, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, Volume II (Longmans, Green and Co., 1912)
Pandya Kingdom590–1330 — K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, The Pandyan Kingdom: From the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century (Luzac & Co., 1929)
Tu'i Tonga Empire1535–1610 — Basil Thomson, The Diversions of a Prime Minister (William Blackwood and Sons, 1894)
Mayapan1263–1461 — H.E.D. Pollock, Ralph L. Roys, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, A. Ledyard Smith, Mayapan, Yucatan, Mexico, in Carnegie Institution of Washington, Publication 619 (Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1962)
Hoysala Empire1022–1342 — William Coelho, The Hoysala Vamsa (Indian Historical Research Institute, St. Xavier's College, 1950)
Etruscan League (Etruria)616–283 BC — George Dennis, The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (John Murray, 1848)
Luwu1300–1611 — F. David Bulbeck and Bagyo Prasetyo, Two millennia of socio-cultural development in Luwu, South Sulawesi, Indonesia, in Origins of Complex Society in South Sulawesi (OXIS) project (2007)
Sokoto Caliphate1800–1903 — Flora L. Shaw (Lady Lugard), A Tropical Dependency: An Outline of the Ancient History of the Western Soudan with an Account of the Modern Settlement of Northern Nigeria (James Nisbet & Co., 1905)
Teotihuacan200 BC – AD 700 — George L. Cowgill, State and Society at Teotihuacan, Mexico, in Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 26 (1997)
The Kingdom of Sukhothai1238–1370 — W. A. R. Wood, A History of Siam, from the Earliest Times to the Year A.D. 1781 (T. Fisher Unwin, 1924)
The Sultanate of Magindanao1475–1837 — Najeeb M. Saleeby, Studies in Moro History, Law, and Religion (Bureau of Public Printing, Manila (Ethnological Survey Publications, Vol. IV, Part I), 1905)
The Sultanate of Kedah1474–1821 — R. O. Winstedt, History of Kedah (Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, No. 81, 1920)
Cahokia900–1400 — Melvin L. Fowler, The Cahokia Atlas: A Historical Atlas of Cahokia Archaeology (Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, 1989)
Every work, by how much rests on it
Searches authors, titles and ids
Homer B. Hulbert, The History of Korea, Volume I (Methodist Publishing House (Seoul), 1905)
hulbert-1905A pioneering English-language history of Korea from the Dangun founding legend through the fall of the Joseon dynasty, drawing on Korean and Chinese annals. Used here for Gojoseon's span from the legendary founding of Tan-gun (2332 BCE) through Gija's arrival (1122 BCE), Wiman's usurpation (193 BCE), and the Han Chinese conquest that ended Wiman's line (106 BCE). Also covers, in continuous Three Kingdoms-era narrative, Goguryeo's King Tam-dok (Gwanggaeto, r. 391/2-413) and his successor Kö-ryŭn (Jangsu), Baekje's loss of its Han River capital and 475 move to Ungjin under King Mun-ju, and Silla's early sixth-century reforms under Chi-jeung and Pŏp-hŭng - the 504 renaming of the kingdom, Yi Cha-don's 527 martyrdom for Buddhism, and the same year's peaceful absorption of the Ka-rak confederacy. Also covers, for Koryŏ, the 1170 military coup and the massacre of civil officials that followed, and Ch'oe Ch'ung-hŏn's 1196 coup that founded the family dictatorship later held by Ch'oe U. For Joseon, covers King Yŏnsan-gun's reign of terror and 1506 deposition. Out of copyright.
217 citations · 43 chaptersBaekje, Balhae, Buyeo (Puyŏ), Gaya Confederacy, Goguryeo, Gojoseon (Old Joseon), Goryeo, Joseon, Later Baekje, Silla, Taebong
Jamil M. Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (Cambridge University Press, 1987)
abun-nasr-1987194 citations · 50 chaptersAghlabid Emirate, Hafsid Sultanate, Idrisid Dynasty, Marinid Sultanate, Midrarid Emirate of Sijilmasa, Rustamid Imamate, Saadi Sultanate, Umayyad Caliphate, Wattasid Dynasty, Zayyanid Kingdom of Tlemcen, Zirid Dynasty
Vincent A. Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (Clarendon Press, 1904)
smith-1904A narrative political history running from the sixth century BC through the Kushans and up to the Muslim conquests, by an official of the Indian Civil Service writing at the point where inscriptional and numismatic evidence for the Mauryas and Kushans was still being assembled. Cited here for Bindusara's reign, unattested in any surviving inscription of his own, and for Vima Kadphises' war with Han China; also, in its fourteenth chapter, for the Gurjara-Pratihara, Pala and Gahadavala dynasties of Kanauj and their neighbours, drawing on the epigraphic scholarship the author collates from Kielhorn's and others' inscription lists; and for the Kalinga king Kharavela's Hathigumpha inscription and its reference to an Andhra king Satakarni in the west, King Hala's Gathasaptasati Prakrit poetry anthology, and Muhammad son of Bakhtiyar's 1193-94 conquest of Bihar and Bengal. Out of copyright.
178 citations · 41 chaptersChahamana Dynasty of Ajmer, Chandela Dynasty of Jejakabhukti, Gahadavala Dynasty of Kanauj, Gurjara-Pratihara Empire, Harsha Empire, Kanva Empire, Kushan Empire, Maurya Empire, Nanda Empire, Pala Empire, Satavahana Empire, Sena Dynasty of Bengal, Shunga Empire
William Elliot Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Book I: History of Japan, from 660 B.C. to 1872 A.D. (Harper & Brothers, 1883)
griffis-1883A nineteenth-century narrative history of Japan, explicit about the legendary status of Jimmu's traditional 660 BC founding and treating the reign of Kimmei (540-571), when Buddhism and continental civilization arrived from Korea, as the point the succession becomes reasonably historical. Used here for the Yamato imperial court's span through Minamoto no Yoritomo's 1192 appointment as shogun. Out of copyright.
162 citations · 29 chaptersThe Ashikaga Shogunate, The Kamakura Shogunate, The Kenmu Restoration, Nanboku-chō (the Southern Court), The Tokugawa Shogunate, The Toyotomi Regime, Yamato (Imperial Japan)
Ian Shaw (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2000)
shaw-2000161 citations · 37 chaptersEgypt, Early Dynastic Period, Egypt, First Intermediate Period, Egypt, Middle Kingdom, Egypt, the Native Restoration, Egypt, New Kingdom, Egypt, Old Kingdom, Egypt, Saite Period, Egypt, Third Intermediate Period, The Hyksos
Demetrius Charles Boulger, The History of China (W. Thacker & Co., 1898)
boulger-1898A narrative political history in three volumes running from antiquity to 1895. Cited here for the founding of the Sung by Chao K'uang-yin in 960, the 1127 fall of Kaifeng to the Jin, the destruction of the last Sung fleet at Yamen in 1279, and, from volumes one and two, Nurhaci's rise, the 1644 Manchu conquest, the revolt of Wu Sangui, Qianlong's reign, the first Opium War, the Taiping rebellion and Gordon's campaigns, and the war with Japan of 1894-95. Out of copyright.
151 citations · 40 chaptersCao Wei, The Five Dynasties, Jin Empire, Jin Empire, Ming Empire, Northern Wei, Qing Empire, Song Empire, Western Xia, Yuan Empire
C. E. Bosworth, The New Islamic Dynasties: A Chronological and Genealogical Manual (Edinburgh University Press, 1996)
bosworth-1996The spine for regnal dates and dynastic spans throughout. Where this repository gives a span as a single year, it is usually Bosworth's.
138 citations · 6 chaptersAbbasid Caliphate, Ak Koyunlu, Artuqid Dynasty, Bavand Dynasty, Buyid Confederation, Ghaznavid Empire, Ghurid Sultanate, Great Seljuk Empire, Kakuyid Dynasty, Kara Koyunlu, Khwarazmian Empire, Ma'munid Khwarazmshahs, Najahid Dynasty, Samanid Empire, Shirvanshahs, Tahirid Dynasty, Tahirid Sultanate of Yemen, Zaydi Imamate of Yemen, Ziyadid Dynasty, Ziyarid Dynasty, Zurayid Dynasty
M. C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.1200, 4th edn (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
ricklefs-2008The standard general history, beginning at exactly the point this corpus's Majapahit record does. Cited here for the fifteenth century — the Paregreg war, the Islamisation of the north Java ports and the shift of trade to Melaka — which hall-2011 covers as trade history and Ricklefs as politics.
136 citations · 33 chaptersSultanate of Banjar, The Sultanate of Banten, Sultanate of Cirebon, The Sultanate of Demak, Majapahit, The Sultanate of Mataram, Medang, The Kingdom of Pajang, Palembang Sultanate, Samudera Pasai, The Sunda Kingdom
Sir Wolseley Haig (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume III: Turks and Afghans (Cambridge University Press, 1928)
haig-1928Dedicated chapters on each of the regional sultanates that broke from Delhi after Timur's 1398 sack - Jaunpur, Bengal, Kashmir, Gujarat, Khandesh and Malwa - drawing on the Persian chronicles of each court. Out of copyright.
121 citations · 27 chaptersSultanate of Bengal, Sultanate of Gujarat, Sharqi Sultanate of Jaunpur, Sultanate of Kashmir, Sultanate of Khandesh, Sultanate of Malwa
Rein Taagepera, Expansion and Contraction Patterns of Large Polities: Context for Russia, in International Studies Quarterly 41(3), 475-504 (1997)
taagepera-1997Source for peak territorial extent. Taagepera reports in megametres squared; this repository stores km2 as given, without rescaling beyond the unit conversion.
109 citationsAbbasid Caliphate, Almohad Caliphate, The Khmer Empire, Ayyubid Sultanate, Buyid Confederation, Byzantine Empire, Carolingian Empire, Chagatai Khanate, Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba, Delhi Sultanate, Fatimid Caliphate, Ghaznavid Empire, First Turkic Khaganate, Golden Horde, Great Seljuk Empire, Harsha Empire, Holy Roman Empire, Ilkhanate, Inca Empire, Jin Empire, Kassite Dynasty of Babylon, Khazar Khaganate, Khwarazmian Empire, Liao Empire, Mali Empire, Mamluk Sultanate, Ming Empire, Mongol Empire, Mughal Empire, Ottoman Empire, Qing Empire, Rashidun Caliphate, Safavid Empire, Samanid Empire, Song Empire, Songhai Empire, Sui Empire, Tahirid Dynasty, Tang Empire, Tibetan Empire, Timurid Empire, The Tsardom and Empire of Russia, Umayyad Caliphate, Uyghur Khaganate, Yuan Empire
George Coedes, edited by Walter F. Vella, translated by Susan Brown Cowing, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (University of Hawaii Press, 1968)
coedes-1968The translation of the third French edition of 1964. It is the work that assembled the epigraphy of mainland and island Southeast Asia into one narrative, and it is old enough that its organising idea — a set of states formed by the reception of Indian models — has been argued with ever since. This site uses it for chronology and for inscriptions, and takes the framework as a position rather than as a background.
101 citations · 30 chaptersThe Khmer Empire, Champa, The Kingdom of Gelgel, The Kingdom of Kediri, Lan Xang (Luang Prabang and Vientiane), Majapahit, Medang, Singhasari, Srivijaya, The Sunda Kingdom
Henry H. Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part II: The So-Called Tartars of Russia and Central Asia, Division II (Longmans, Green, 1880)
howorth-1880The nineteenth-century compilation that assembled, in English, the Russian chronicle material and the Persian and Turkic histories on the Jochid successor states — the White Horde and the Kazakhs, the Uzbeks, Khwarazm, the Shibanids of Siberia, and the Nogais. Howorth is a compiler rather than a researcher of manuscripts, and he follows Karamzin and Müller closely; what he offers is continuous narrative with his sources named in the notes, for polities where nothing else in English is continuous at all. Out of copyright.
100 citations · 29 chaptersKhanate of Bukhara, Kazakh Khanate, Khanate of Sibir, Khanate of Khiva, Khanate of Kokand, Nogai Horde, Shaybanid Khanate
Jón Stefánsson, Denmark and Sweden with Iceland and Finland (1916)
stefansson-denmark-1916A single-volume English-language narrative history covering Denmark from the earliest classical-era references through the nineteenth century (Part I), with a parallel history of Sweden (Part III) and a shorter account of Iceland (Part II). Cites the runic inscriptions on the Jelling stones directly. Open access via archive.org.
99 citations · 35 chaptersCharles E. Chapman, A History of Spain, Founded on the Historia de España y de la Civilización Española of Rafael Altamira (1918)
chapman-1918An English-language narrative history of Spain from the Visigothic collapse onward, covering the traditional Pelayo and Covadonga narrative, Alfonso I's campaigns and the repopulation of the north, Alfonso II's move to Oviedo and the discovery of Santiago's relics, Alfonso III's reign, and his forced abdication and the 910 division of the kingdom among his sons. Open access via archive.org and Project Gutenberg.
97 citations · 28 chaptersKingdom of Aragon, Kingdom of Asturias, Kingdom of León and Castile, Kingdom of Navarre
B. A. Ogot (ed.), General History of Africa, Volume V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (UNESCO Publishing / James Currey, 1992)
ogot-1992The chapter "The Kongo Kingdom and Its Neighbours" (Vansina, drawing on Hilton, Thornton, Randles, Birmingham, Heintze and Miller) is this corpus's main narrative source for Kongo's social structure, the nzimbu currency, the nkisi religious system, Afonso I's reign, the Jaga invasion, the century-long Ndongo war to 1671, the 1665 Battle of Mbwila, the destruction and abandonment of Mbanza Kongo (1666-1678), Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the 1709 restoration, and Loango's own 1701 succession crisis and the extinction of its royal line by 1787. A separate chapter in the same volume, "From the Cameroon Grasslands to the Upper Nile" (E. M'Bokolo), supplies Loango's founding, its fire-cult kingship and rainmaking ritual, and its Atlantic-era economy and trade. Open access via archive.org.
88 citations · 30 chaptersKingdom of Kongo, Kingdom of Loango, Luba Kingdom, Lunda Empire, Kingdom of Ndongo
William Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)
coxe-austria-1847A three-volume English-language narrative history of the House of Habsburg by an Anglican archdeacon who researched it partly from the Imperial library in Vienna; this third edition (first published 1807) runs from Rudolf of Habsburg's minor-count origins in Swabia and Alsace through his 1273 election as King of the Romans, the 1278 defeat of Ottokar of Bohemia, and the 1282 investiture of Austria and Styria on his own sons, on to Leopold II's death in 1792. Volume 1 covers the medieval founding period. Open access via archive.org.
86 citations · 43 chaptersKenneth R. Hall, A History of Early Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and Societal Development, 100-1500 (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011)
hall-201184 citations · 19 chaptersThe Kingdom of Kediri, Majapahit, Medang, Sultanate of Melaka, Kediri under Jayakatwang, Singhasari, Srivijaya
Nicola Di Cosmo, Allen J. Frank and Peter B. Golden (eds), The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
di-cosmo-2009Covers the Mongol empire, its Chinggisid successor states and the non-Chinggisid dynasties that followed them, from the twelfth century to Russian and Chinese hegemony. Cited for the Uzbek khanate, which this corpus had been naming in prose on two pages while leaving the field that should point at it empty.
82 citations · 18 chaptersKhanate of Astrakhan, Crimean Khanate, Khanate of Kazan, Shaybanid Khanate
A. C. S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yildiz (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (I.B. Tauris, 2013)
peacock-yildiz-201382 citations · 23 chaptersAydinid Beylik, Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, Danishmendid Dynasty, Karamanid Beylik, Sultanate of Rum
G. Yazdani (ed.), The Early History of the Deccan (Oxford University Press / Government of Andhra Pradesh, 1960)
yazdani-1960A multi-author edited scholarly volume, each dynasty covered by its own specialist: the Satavahana chapter by C. V. Rao (Andhra University), the Chalukyas of Badami and the Rashtrakutas by K. A. Nilakanta Sastri and A. S. Altekar respectively, and the Kakatiyas of Warangal by N. Venkataramanayya and C. Somasekhara Sarma. Used here for the Satavahana, Chalukya (Badami), Rashtrakuta and Kakatiya records. The Satavahana chapter is explicit about how thin and contested the dynasty's own chronology is - competing scholarly equations for the same king's accession differ by decades - and about which parts of the Puranic tradition its own author judges unreliable, including the popular claim that the dynasty's founder personally destroyed the Kanva line at Magadha. The Chalukya chapter covers, in detail, the thirteen-year interregnum after Pulakeshin II's death (including Queen Vijaya-Bhattarika's regency for her husband Chandraditya) and Vikramaditya I's restoration of the kingdom and inconclusive war with the Pallavas, including his defeat at Peruvalanallur in 674.
80 citations · 17 chaptersChalukya Empire (Badami), Kakatiya Dynasty, Rashtrakuta Empire, Satavahana Empire
V. O. Kliuchevsky, translated by C. J. Hogarth, A History of Russia, Volumes I and II (J. M. Dent & Sons / E. P. Dutton, 1912)
kliuchevsky-1912The standard English translation of the great Russian historian's lecture-course history, covering Daniel of Moscow's 1263 founding of the princely line, the rise of Moscow among the appanages, the Tartar yoke, and Ivan III and Ivan IV's building of the Muscovite autocracy through Ivan IV's 1547 coronation as Tsar. Out of copyright.
79 citations · 18 chaptersThe Grand Principality of Moscow, The Tsardom and Empire of Russia, Principality of Tver, Vladimir-Suzdal
Edward Harper Parker, A Thousand Years of the Tartars (Sampson Low, London, 1895)
parker-1895A British consul in China who read the dynastic histories and turned their accounts of the northern peoples — Xiongnu, Xianbei, Rouran, Türk, Uyghur, Khitan — into a continuous narrative in English, translating long stretches of Sima Qian and the Han and Tang histories as he went. He is opinionated, his transcriptions are his own, and his Victorian asides about the peoples he describes are of their period and are not the reason to read him. What he offers is the Chinese record of the steppe, in English, in order. Used for its own dedicated book on the Rouran Khaganate (his "Jwen-jwen"), from the fugitive smith Mukkuru's own descendants through Khagan Anakwe's 546 defeat and suicide and the massacre of the last refugees at the Western Wei court, in addition to its use elsewhere on Northern Wei, Western Xia and other steppe-adjacent records. Out of copyright.
78 citations · 23 chaptersHan Empire, Liao Empire, Northern Wei, Northern Zhou, Rouran Khaganate, Sui Empire, Western Xia
Muhammad Qasim Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (Vol. III) (R. Cambray & Co. / Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1910)
firishta-briggs-1829-v3The third volume of the same Briggs translation as firishta-briggs-1829 (this 1910 Calcutta reprint, not the 1829 first edition, is the copy used here), carrying the dedicated histories of the five sultanates that succeeded the Bahmani state: Bijapur (Adil Shahy), Ahmadnagar (Nizam Shahy), Golconda (Qutb Shahy), Berar (Imad Shahy) and Bidar (Barid Shahy). Firishta's own coverage is uneven across the five - his English editor notes that the Bijapur section "leaves off so abruptly" around 1596 that Firishta probably died before finishing it, while Firishta himself states outright, opening the Bidar section, that he could find no written histories at all for the Qutb Shahy, Imad Shahy or Barid Shahy dynasties and was compelled to rely on oral tradition for all three. None of the five sultanates' own actual ends - Berar absorbed by Ahmadnagar in 1574, the rest falling to Mughal conquest between 1600 and 1687 - falls within what this source narrates; each record drafted from it closes on the last year the source itself reaches, not on the polity's real end. Out of copyright.
76 citations · 3 chaptersAhmadnagar Sultanate, Berar Sultanate, Bidar Sultanate, Bijapur Sultanate, Golconda Sultanate
Josef Wiesehöfer, trans. Azizeh Azodi, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD (I.B. Tauris, 1996)
wiesehofer-1996A survey of the whole twelve hundred years built on Persian written, archaeological and numismatic evidence rather than on the Greek and Roman accounts the Western tradition has usually reached it through — which is the argument this site's Achaemenid and Parthian records already make and had been making from other books. Cited here for the small dynasties the imperial narratives leave out.
71 citations · 19 chaptersAdiabene, Media Atropatene, Characene, Elymais, Kingdom of Persis
Demetrius Charles Boulger, The History of China, Volume I (W. Thacker & Co., 1881)
boulger-china-1881A narrative political history of China from earliest times through the Mongol decline, drawing chiefly on the Jesuit compilation of du Halde and on de Mailla's own translation of the Tongkien Kangmou. Cited here for chapters XI and XII, "The Song and the Tsi Rulers" and "Three Small Dynasties" (the Liang, Chen and Sui), covering the Southern Dynasties from Liu Yu's 420 accession through the Sui reunification of 589.
70 citations · 20 chaptersChen Dynasty, Han Empire, Liang Dynasty, Liu Song (Southern) Dynasty, Qin Empire, Southern Qi Dynasty, Tang Empire
Hugh Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century, 2nd edn (Pearson Longman, 2004)
kennedy-200470 citations · 15 chaptersAbbasid Caliphate, Hamdanid Dynasty, Marwanid Emirate, Mirdasid Emirate, Rashidun Caliphate, Umayyad Caliphate, Uqaylid Emirate
Farhad Daftary, The Isma'ilis: Their History and Doctrines, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2007)
daftary-2007The standard survey of Isma'ili history across twelve centuries, and the source for the Nizari state on this site. Used particularly for its insistence that the Nizaris be read from Isma'ili material rather than from the hostile chronicles and Crusader traveller-tales that supplied almost everything Europe believed about them.
69 citations · 15 chaptersNajahid Dynasty, Nizari Isma'ili State, Qarmatian State of Bahrayn, Sulayhid Dynasty, Zurayid Dynasty
Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 6: Alien Regimes and Border States, 907-1368 (Cambridge University Press, 1994)
franke-twitchett-199469 citations · 17 chaptersC. H. Stigand, The Land of Zinj, Being an Account of British East Africa, Its Ancient History and Present Inhabitants (Constable and Company, 1913)
stigand-1913A British colonial officer's account of East Africa, opening with two chapters of coastal history compiled from Arab, Portuguese and Swahili sources - the second dictated to Stigand over several months by Bwana Kitini, a descendant of the Pate sultans, from records Stigand himself was never shown. Used here for the Mazaru'i governorship of Mombasa: their installation as custodians of the fort in 1739, Ali bin Osman's seizure of independent rule in 1746 after avenging the murdered Imam-appointed governor, the following century of conflict with Pate and with the Busaidi Imams and Sultans of Oman over Pemba and the coast, the Mazaru'i's own approach to the British survey officer Owen in the 1820s, and the treachery by which Sayyid Sa'id finally took the fort and deported the ruling family in chains in 1837. Dates are given in both the Christian and Hejra calendars in the source; only the Christian dates are used here. Out of copyright.
67 citations · 12 chaptersWarren Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (Stanford University Press, 1997)
treadgold-199765 citations · 17 chaptersByzantine Empire, Latin Empire of Constantinople, Empire of Nicaea, Roman Empire, Empire of Trebizond
James Fletcher, The History of Poland, from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Harper & Brothers, 1836)
fletcher-1836A nineteenth-century narrative history running from the legendary Piast founding through the Jagiellonian union with Lithuania, the 1569 Union of Lublin, the eighteenth-century partitions, and on into the author's own near-present - closing with a "Narrative of Recent Events" extracted from an 1831 magazine article that covers the Napoleonic Grand Duchy of Warsaw, the constitutional Congress Kingdom of Poland the Congress of Vienna re-erected in 1815, and the opening months of the November 1830 uprising, breaking off with General Skrzynecki newly in command, before the rising's actual defeat that September. Used here for the Piast and Jagiellonian Kingdom of Poland's span from Mieszko I's baptism through Casimir the Great's reign and Louis of Hungary's succession, Jadwiga and Jogaila, and the 1569 union; and, on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth's own page, for the partitions of 1772-95 and the Napoleonic and Congress-era afterlife that followed them. Out of copyright.
64 citations · 15 chaptersMalcolm Barber, The Crusader States (Yale University Press, 2012)
barber-2012A political history of the four Frankish states of the Levant as states — how they were governed, paid for and defended — rather than as episodes in the history of the crusading movement. The spine for the Jerusalem and Edessa records here, and the work this site relies on for the distinction between the kingdom that ended in 1187 and the one that ended in 1291.
62 citations · 10 chaptersAmmarid Emirate of Tripoli, Principality of Antioch, County of Edessa, Kingdom of Jerusalem, County of Tripoli
Carl F. Petry (ed.), The Cambridge History of Egypt, Volume 1: Islamic Egypt 640-1517 (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
petry-199862 citations · 14 chaptersAyyubid Sultanate, Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, Ikhshidid Emirate, Mamluk Sultanate, Tulunid Emirate
Henry H. Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part I: The Mongols Proper and the Kalmuks (Longmans, Green, 1876)
howorth-1876The first volume of the same compilation, and the only continuous account in English of what the house of Chinggis did after it lost China — the khans at Karakorum, the catastrophe at Buyur Nor, the Oirat ascendancy, Dayan Khan, the conversion to Lamaism and Ligdan's collapse before the Manchus. Howorth works from de Mailla and Delamarre for the Chinese side and from Schmidt's translation of Sanang Setsen's Erdeni-yin Tobchi for the Mongol one, and says which is which, including where they contradict each other and where the Mongol chronicle passes over a disaster in silence. His asides on the peoples he is describing are of their period and are not the reason to read him. Out of copyright.
57 citations · 19 chaptersChagatai Khanate, Dzungar Khanate, Mongol Empire, Northern Yuan
Ronald Grigor Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd edn (Indiana University Press, 1994)
suny-1994The standard account of Georgian history in English, from the first millennium BC to 1991. Cited for the same reason as the Armenian volumes: the corpus had been referring to Georgia on eight pages without carrying it.
57 citations · 14 chaptersKingdom of Iberia, Kingdom of Georgia, Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti
Francis, Count Lützow, Bohemia: An Historical Sketch (1920)
lutzow-bohemia-1920A single-volume English-language narrative history of Bohemia by a Czech nobleman writing for British readers, running from the legendary and early Přemyslid period through the Battle of the White Mountain (1620) and the following three centuries of Habsburg rule. Debunks the Libuše-and-Přemysl founding legend as a later chronicler's invention. Open access via archive.org.
56 citations · 15 chaptersPeter Jackson and Laurence Lockhart (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods (Cambridge University Press, 1986)
chi-6Contains H. R. Roemer's chapters on the Türkmen dynasties and the successors of Timur, which are the standard English narrative of the fifteenth century in Iran and Azerbaijan. This site had been running two Turkmen pages off a genealogical manual.
55 citations · 16 chaptersEdwin Lawrence Godkin, The History of Hungary and the Magyars, from the Earliest Period to the Close of the Late War (John W. Parker and Son, 1853)
godkin-1853A nineteenth-century narrative history running from the Magyar conquest of the Carpathian basin through the 1848-49 war of independence. Used here for the medieval Kingdom of Hungary's span from the conquest (884-895) and Stephen I's coronation through the Golden Bull, the Mongol invasion, John Hunyadi and Matthias Corvinus's reign, and the 1526 Battle of Mohacs. Out of copyright.
53 citations · 12 chaptersF. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, in The Oxford History of England, vol. 2, 1st ed. (1943)
stenton-1943The standard scholarly narrative of England from the settlement through 1087, covering Egbert's rise, Alfred's wars and reforms, Edward the Elder and Æthelflæd's reconquest of the Danelaw, Æthelstan's 927 conquest of Northumbria and the Eamont submission, Brunanburh, Edgar's Bath coronation, Æthelred's reign and the St Brice's Day massacre, Cnut's conquest and reign, Edward the Confessor, and the 1066 succession crisis and Norman Conquest. Open access via a Digital Library of India scan on archive.org.
50 citations · 15 chaptersGreg Fisher, Between Empires: Arabs, Romans, and Sasanians in Late Antiquity, in Oxford Classical Monographs (Oxford University Press, 2011)
fisher-2011The study of the Arab clients of Rome and Iran in the century before Islam, and the reason this site's page is called Jafnid rather than Ghassanid. Fisher separates the ruling families — Jafnids, Nasrids, Hujrids — from the confederacies later tradition attached to them (Ghassan, Lakhm, Kinda), and argues that the empires' agreements were with individuals rather than with peoples. That distinction is a claim about what kind of object a polity is, which is this site's own question.
48 citations · 13 chaptersSimon Martin and Nikolai Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya (Thames & Hudson, 2008)
martin-grube-2008The standard modern synthesis of Classic Maya dynastic history, built city by city from the deciphered glyphic record - royal accessions, war narratives, captures and dynastic genealogies read directly off stelae, lintels and painted ceramics. Used for Tikal, Calakmul and Palenque: Tikal's dynastic founder Yax Ehb Xook and its first securely dated monument, Stela 29 of 292; the "entrada" of 15 January 378, when the lord Sihyaj K'ahk' arrived at Tikal, Chak Tok Ich'aak I died the same day, and a new Teotihuacan-linked royal line took the throne; Tikal's "star war" defeat in 562 and the ensuing 130-year Hiatus during which the city raised no dated monuments; Jasaw Chan K'awiil I's August 695 victory over Calakmul's king Yich'aak K'ahk'; and Tikal's final dated monument, Stela 11 of 869. A modern copyrighted synthesis, not a public-domain text, but the standard account of a dynastic history that is only readable at all because of scholarship from the last several decades.
48 citations · 15 chaptersR. N. Frye (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 4: From the Arab Invasion to the Saljuqs (Cambridge University Press, 1975)
chi-447 citations · 21 chaptersBavand Dynasty, Buyid Confederation, Kakuyid Dynasty, Ma'munid Khwarazmshahs, Samanid Empire, Tahirid Dynasty, Ziyarid Dynasty
G. W. Kitchin, A History of France, in 3 vols (1873-1899)
kitchin-1899A standard English-language narrative spanning Hugh Capet's 987 election at Reims through the Revolution; volume 1 covers 987-1453 (Louis VI's 1111 siege of Le Puiset, drawing on Abbot Suger's own biography of the king; Bouvines; Crécy and Poitiers; the Templars' suppression, Jeanne Darc and the Hundred Years War's end at Castillon), volume 2 covers 1453-1624 (the Wars of Religion, the Edict of Nantes), and volume 3 covers 1624-1792 (Louis XIV, the Revolution's opening years). Open access via archive.org, digitised from Digital Library of India scans.
47 citations · 15 chaptersRichard G. Hovannisian (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times (St. Martin's Press, 1997)
hovannisian-1997Two volumes covering antiquity to the twentieth century, and the most comprehensive treatment of the whole span in English. Cited because Armenia is named on eighteen pages of this corpus — from the Sasanians to the Safavids — and had no record of its own.
46 citations · 11 chaptersDenis Twitchett and Michael Loewe (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 1: The Ch'in and Han Empires, 221 BC-AD 220 (Cambridge University Press, 1986)
loewe-twitchett-198645 citations · 10 chaptersCarole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh University Press, 1999)
hillenbrand-199943 citations · 14 chaptersPrincipality of Antioch, Artuqid Dynasty, Ayyubid Sultanate, Kingdom of Jerusalem, Nizari Isma'ili State, Zangid Dynasty
Mirza Muhammad Haidar Dughlat, The Tarikh-i-Rashidi: A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia (Sampson Low, Marston, 1895)
rashidi-elias-rossA Chaghatayid noble of the Dughlat house, cousin to Babur, who ended his life ruling Kashmir and wrote the history of his own people because nobody else had. It is the principal source for Moghulistan, for the eastern Chaghatai khans, and for the origins of the Kazakhs, and for long stretches it is the only one. He is writing about his own family's rivals and patrons, he is a partisan of the Chaghatayid line against the Uzbeks, and the early sections rest on oral tradition he says so himself. Ney Elias's introduction and notes run to nearly two hundred pages and are a separate work of geography. Out of copyright.
43 citations · 14 chaptersHugh Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal: A Political History of al-Andalus (Longman, 1996)
kennedy-199642 citations · 10 chaptersD. T. Potts, The Archaeology of Elam: Formation and Transformation of an Ancient Iranian State, in Cambridge World Archaeology, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
potts-2016The standard account, revised from 1999 with more than eight hundred additional sources. Potts is an archaeologist and the book is organised around material evidence, which is why this site's two Elamite records carry one coded institution each: what survives is monuments, royal inscriptions and other people's descriptions, not administration.
42 citations · 8 chaptersMiddle Elamite Kingdom, Neo-Elamite Kingdom, Old Elam: Awan, Shimashki and the Sukkalmahs
Romila Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (University of California Press, 2002)
thapar-200242 citations · 12 chaptersMarc Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000-323 BC, 3rd edn (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015)
van-de-mieroop-201542 citations · 8 chaptersAkkadian Empire, Median Empire, Mitanni, Neo-Assyrian Empire
Leonard Y. Andaya, The Kingdom of Johor, 1641-1728: Economic and Political Developments (Oxford University Press, 1975)
andaya-1975Built on the Dutch company records at The Hague, which are the fullest external archive anybody kept on a Malay court in this period. It covers eighty-seven of this site's Johor record's hundred and seventy-one years, including the killing of 1699, and the record's span dates outside that window come from elsewhere.
41 citations · 8 chaptersThe Sultanate of Johor, Sultanate of Riau-Lingga, Sultanate of Siak Sri Indrapura
Leonard Y. Andaya, The World of Maluku: Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period (University of Hawaii Press, 1993)
andaya-1993The standard account of the north Moluccas, built on Iberian and Dutch records read against Malukan categories rather than through them. Its organising argument — that Maluku was structured by a dualism between Ternate and Tidore rather than by a single centre — is why this site's Ternate record is written the way it is.
41 citations · 9 chaptersHubert Howe Bancroft, The Native Races, Volume 5: Primitive History (A.L. Bancroft & Company, 1875)
bancroft-1875A compendious 19th-century synthesis of the colonial Nahua and Spanish chronicle sources (chiefly Ixtlilxochitl, Veytia, Torquemada and the Codex Chimalpopoca as relayed through Brasseur de Bourbourg), covering the Toltec migration and founding of Tollan, the reign and religious reforms of Topiltzin Ceacatl Quetzalcoatl, the scandal of Huemac II and Xochitl, the final wars and 1062 flight of Topiltzin Acxitl that ended the Toltec state, the Chichimec settlement that granted Azcapotzalco to the Tepanec lord Acolhua, and the reign, 1427 death, and succession crisis of the Tepanec king Tezozomoc that led to Maxtla's usurpation. A 19th-century compilation rather than a modern critical edition; its own chronology among competing colonial sources is treated here as tradition, not settled fact. Public domain, open access via Project Gutenberg.
41 citations · 15 chaptersPeter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (Otto Harrassowitz, 1992)
golden-1992Used for the steppe polities: Karakhanid, Uyghur, Khazar.
41 citations · 14 chaptersFirst Turkic Khaganate, Karakhanid Khanate, Khazar Khaganate, Uyghur Khaganate
G. E. Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824, the Beginning of the English Conquest (Longmans, Green and Co., 1925)
harvey-burma-1925A colonial-service official's narrative history drawing on Burmese chronicles (the Hmannan and others), Portuguese and Dutch contemporary accounts, and Burmese royal inscriptions. Cited here, in its own chapters VI and VII, for the Toungoo dynasty (1531-1752) - Tabinshwehti's conquest of Pegu and Martaban, Bayinnaung's reign, and the 1752 fall of Ava - and the founding of the Alaungpaya (Konbaung) dynasty that followed it.
41 citations · 14 chaptersRein Taagepera, Size and Duration of Empires: Growth-Decline Curves, 600 B.C. to 600 A.D., in Social Science History 3(3/4), 115-138 (1979)
taagepera-197941 citationsAchaemenid Empire, Gupta Empire, Han Empire, Kushan Empire, Macedonian Empire, Maurya Empire, Median Empire, Parthian Empire, Qin Empire, Roman Empire, Sasanian Empire, Seleucid Empire, Xiongnu Confederation
Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen and C. F. Keary, A History of Norway: From the Earliest Times (1886)
boyesen-norway-1886A single-volume English-language narrative history of Norway drawing extensively on Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla for the Viking Age and the saga kings - Harald Fairhair's unification at Hafrsfjord (872), Erik Bloodaxe, Haakon the Good - and continuing through the medieval kingdom, the Kalmar and Danish unions, and Norway's 1814 constitutional convention at Eidsvoll. Open access via archive.org.
40 citations · 16 chaptersMadawi Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
al-rasheed-2010The standard single-volume history, by an anthropologist from a family the Saudi state displaced, which is worth knowing and does not make the book partisan — it makes it unusually attentive to the regional powers the national narrative absorbs. Cited for the three Saudi states and for the Rashidi record alongside her own monograph on them.
38 citations · 9 chaptersEmirate of Diriyah, Emirate of Nejd, Emirate of Jabal Shammar
Muhammad Qasim Firishta, History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, till the Year A.D. 1612 (Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1829)
firishta-briggs-1829A seventeenth-century Persian court history translated into English in four volumes; volume two carries the dedicated section on "the kings of Koolburga, denominated Bahmuny" from Ala-ud-Din Hasan's 1347 coronation through Kalimullah Shah's 1526 flight into exile. Written nearly three centuries after the events it opens with and drawing on earlier chronicles Firishta names but that do not themselves survive complete, so its dates for early reigns rest on his own reported reconciliation of conflicting sources rather than on inscriptions. Firishta is openly skeptical of some of his own material, including the Bahmani dynasty's own claimed descent from an ancient Persian king. Out of copyright. See also firishta-briggs-1829-v3, the third volume of the same translation, covering the five sultanates the Bahmani state broke into.
38 citations · 18 chaptersAhmadnagar Sultanate, Bahmani Sultanate, Berar Sultanate, Bidar Sultanate, Bijapur Sultanate, Golconda Sultanate
Paul-Alain Beaulieu, A History of Babylon, 2200 BC - AD 75, in Blackwell History of the Ancient World (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018)
beaulieu-2018The narrative spine of this site's Neo-Babylonian record. Beaulieu is a professor of Assyriology at Toronto and the standard modern authority on the period's last king; the book's virtue for this corpus is that it treats Babylon as one continuous object across seventeen centuries, which is what makes it possible to say precisely which Babylon this page is.
37 citations · 8 chaptersAmira K. Bennison, The Almoravid and Almohad Empires (Edinburgh University Press, 2016)
bennison-201637 citations · 7 chaptersR. Bosworth Smith, Carthage and the Carthaginians (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1878)
bosworth-smith-carthage-1878A narrative history drawing on Justin's epitome of Trogus, Polybius and Appian's accounts of the Punic Wars, and Virgil's own Dido episode, which the author is careful to separate from the earlier, plainer Phoenician tradition it was built on. Cited here for the Dido/Elissa founding legend, the 537 BC alliance with the Etruscans against Phocaean settlers at Corsica (the battle of Alalia), and the 146 BC destruction of Carthage by Scipio Aemilianus at the close of the Third Punic War.
37 citations · 12 chaptersEhsan Yarshater (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 3: The Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Periods (Cambridge University Press, 1983)
chi-337 citations · 10 chaptersDenis Twitchett (ed.), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 3: Sui and T'ang China, 589-906, Part 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1979)
twitchett-197937 citations · 7 chaptersJohn V. A. Fine, The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century (University of Michigan Press, 1983)
fine-1983The standard English narrative of the Balkans before 1200 and the source for this site's First Bulgarian record. Fine is careful about the difference between what the Byzantine sources say happened in Bulgaria and what can be established, which matters on a record where almost all the written evidence is the enemy's. Also cited on Croatia's own record for the tenth- and eleventh-century kings between Tomislav and Zvonimir - Kresimir II, Stjepan Drzislav, the succession war among Drzislav's sons, Kresimir III's Byzantine vassalage, Stjepan I's expansion, Petar Kresimir IV's 1069 recognition as Byzantine representative in Dalmatia, and Zvonimir's own rise as Ban of Slavonia - and for the "Time of Troubles" after Zvonimir's death: the Trpimirovic dynasty's extinction, Hungarian intervention under Almos, King Peter's brief independent reign and death at Gvozd mountain, and the 1097 loss of Biograd.
36 citations · 9 chaptersG. R. Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661-750, 2nd edn (Routledge, 2000)
hawting-2000The standard Umayyad monograph, and the source for the Sufyanid/Marwanid split and for the argument that the hostile Abbasid-era sources shape most of what is written about the dynasty.
36 citations · 7 chaptersRachel Mairs, The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia (University of California Press, 2014)
mairs-2014Works the archaeology, the coins and the documents of Greek Bactria against the question of what the people there thought they were — which is the right question for a polity that survives almost entirely as objects, and the wrong one to answer from the two paragraphs the classical historians give it. Ai-Khanoum is the book's centre and is the only extensively excavated Hellenistic city in Central Asia.
36 citations · 10 chaptersCharles Bell, Tibet: Past and Present (Clarendon Press, 1924)
bell-1924A former British political officer in Tibet's own general history, written from direct acquaintance with the country and its officials. Used here for the Sakya-Mongol period and background on Atisha's mission; its transliterations and some dates are dated by modern standards and are checked against other sources where the two diverge. Out of copyright.
35 citations · 10 chaptersGanden Phodrang (Dalai Lama's Government), Kingdom of Guge, Sakya Regime (Sakya-Mongol Government of Tibet)
Eckart Frahm, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire (Basic Books, 2023)
frahm-2023A full history from the city on the Tigris to the empire and its afterlife, by an Assyriologist at Yale. Cited here for the institutional material this site's Assyrian record was asserting without a source addressing it — the standing army, the provincial system, the succession oaths — and for the royal women, who are absent from the older narratives.
35 citations · 10 chaptersKassite Dynasty of Babylon, Middle Assyrian Kingdom, Neo-Assyrian Empire
Leonard William King, A History of Sumer and Akkad (Chatto and Windus, 1910)
king-1910A survey of Mesopotamian history to the fall of Babylon by the British Museum's keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities, written when the subject was sixty years old. Much of its reconstruction is superseded — King was not certain that Sargon of Agade and the king he calls Shar-Gani-sharri were the same man. Cited here for exactly that: it records what was known, and how it came to be known, at a moment when the difference between the legend and the evidence was still being worked out. Out of copyright.
35 citations · 10 chaptersAkkadian Empire, Dynasty of Isin, Kingdom of Larsa, Third Dynasty of Ur
Touraj Daryaee, Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (I.B. Tauris, 2009)
daryaee-2009Used for the Sasanian state, its Zoroastrian establishment, and the collapse of 628-651.
34 citations · 8 chaptersKushan Empire, Parthian Empire, Kingdom of Persis, Sasanian Empire
Derek A. Welsby, The Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia: Pagans, Christians and Muslims along the Middle Nile (British Museum Press, 2002)
welsby-2002The standard account of the three Christian Nubian kingdoms, by an excavator who has spent twenty years on them. Cited here for the narrative, the conversion, the baqt and the ending; Ruffini supplies the inside of the state.
34 citations · 9 chaptersAnthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680. Volume One: The Lands below the Winds (Yale University Press, 1988)
reid-1988The first volume of the standard account of the region's commercial centuries, on environment, material life, social organisation and law rather than on dynasties. This site's Melakan institutions are coded from it, because the questions the fields ask are the ones Reid organised the book around.
33 citations · 11 chaptersAceh Darussalam, The Sultanate of Gowa, Sultanate of Melaka, The Sultanate of Patani
H. Morse Stephens, The Story of Portugal (1891)
stephens-1891An English-language narrative history of Portugal, covering Afonso Henriques's founding of the kingdom (and debunking, as a later fabrication, the traditional legend of Christ's vision before Ourique and the "Cortes of Lamego"), the completion of the Algarve conquest under Afonso III, the 1385 crisis and the Battle of Aljubarrota, Prince Henry the Navigator and the school at Sagres, Vasco da Gama's 1498 arrival at Calicut, and the death of King Sebastian at Alcácer Quibir and Philip II's 1580 conquest at Alcântara. Open access via archive.org and Project Gutenberg.
33 citations · 10 chaptersJohn C. Wilkinson, The Imamate Tradition of Oman, in Cambridge Middle East Library (Cambridge University Press, 1987)
wilkinson-1987Traces regional identity, tribal organisation and political authority in south-eastern Arabia across some twelve hundred years. Cited for the first Ibadi imamate, and for the distinction between an imamate as an office repeatedly reconstituted and a dynasty that persists.
33 citations · 8 chaptersC. E. Bosworth, The Political and Dynastic History of the Iranian World (A.D. 1000-1217), in The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 5 (Cambridge University Press, 1968)
bosworth-196832 citations · 9 chaptersRichard Bagwell, Ireland under the Tudors, in 3 vols (1885-1890)
bagwell-1885The standard narrative of the Tudor conquest of Ireland; volume 1 opens with the medieval Lordship's decline (the Statute of Kilkenny, 1367), covers the fifteenth-century ascendancy of the House of Kildare and the 1534 Silken Thomas rebellion that ended it, the 1541 Irish Parliament that made Henry VIII King of Ireland by statute, the 1542-43 surrender-and-regrant creations of the Earls of Tyrone, Thomond and Clanricarde, and the 1556-57 plantation of Leix and Offaly as the King's and Queen's Counties under Mary. Open access via archive.org, also mirrored on Project Gutenberg.
31 citations · 8 chaptersP. Hume Brown, History of Scotland, in 3 vols, Cambridge University Press (1899-1909)
brown-1899A continuous scholarly narrative from the early medieval kingdom through the Reformation, the Union of the Crowns and the Union of 1707. Used here for Kenneth MacAlpin's reign and its own uncertain chronology, the Reformation Parliament and the Treaty of Berwick, James VI's 1603 accession to the English throne, and the Darien disaster and the passing of the Treaty of Union - and, from Volume I ("History of Scotland: To the Accession of Mary Stewart"), the full run of reigns from Malcolm II and the historical Macbeth through the Wars of Independence's own background, the Stewart kings' recurring violent successions, and Flodden and Solway Moss. Open access via archive.org (all three volumes NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT).
31 citations · 12 chaptersJosef A. Katzel, translated and annotated by Daniel K. Berman, A Short History of Lithuania to 1569: Centennial Edition (1921-2021) (Godot Press, 2021)
katzel-2021An annotated English translation of Katzel's 1921 Russian-language popular history of Lithuania to 1569 (Istoriya Litvy), itself a compilation from secondary sources including Lyubavsky's 1915 Review of the Lithuanian-Russian State. The 2021 edition's editorial notes flag points where the century-old original diverges from current scholarship. Covers Ryngold and Mindaugas's founding of the Grand Duchy, Gediminas, Algirdas and Vytautas the Great, the Union of Krewo, the Battle of Grunwald, and the 1569 Union of Lublin.
31 citations · 6 chaptersNehemia Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali (Methuen, 1973)
levtzion-197331 citations · 7 chaptersBernard Pares, A History of Russia (Jonathan Cape, 1926)
pares-1926A single-volume academic history running from the medieval principalities to the 1917 revolutions, used here for the Tsardom and Empire of Russia's span from Ivan IV's reign through the 1613 Romanov election, Peter the Great's 1721 assumption of the imperial title, the 1861 emancipation of the serfs, the 1905 revolution and October Manifesto, and Nicholas II's abdication in March 1917. Out of copyright.
31 citations · 9 chaptersHenry Cassels Kay (ed. and trans.), Yaman: Its Early Mediaeval History (Edward Arnold, 1892)
kay-1892Edition and translation of Umara al-Hakami's history of Yemen, written in the twelfth century by a man who had served the courts he describes, with supplementary extracts from Ibn Khaldun and others. It is the narrative spine for the Ziyadids, Najahids, Sulayhids and Zurayids — the dynasties for which no modern monograph exists — and it is cited here as what it is: a Victorian translation of a partisan contemporary, useful for sequence and detail and to be read against Bosworth for dates.
30 citations · 24 chaptersHimyar, Najahid Dynasty, Qarmatian State of Bahrayn, Saba', Sulayhid Dynasty, Ziyadid Dynasty, Zurayid Dynasty
Robert Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1900)
sewell-1900A narrative history built around full translations of two eyewitness chronicles - Domingo Paes, who described the capital at its height around 1520 under Krishna Deva Raya, and Fernao Nuniz, who wrote a generation later including the traditional founding legend and the empire's near-collapse under Achyuta - framed by Sewell's own critical account drawn from inscriptions and Muslim chroniclers, and including a full translation of a Portuguese eyewitness named Barradas who described the court at Chandragiri in 1614-16. States outright that "the empire fell in 1565" at the battle of Talikota, and shows a titular line of kings persisting at Chandragiri and Vellore for generations after - losing their last real fortresses to the Marathas by 1677 while the family's bloodline survived, via temple grants citing the old royal name as late as 1792-93, down to two descendants living as zamindars under the Nizam of Hyderabad when Sewell himself was writing. Used here for Vijayanagara's founding, Krishna Deva Raya's reign, the visits of Abdur Razzaq and Paes, the fall of 1565, the empire's territorial disintegration and Tirumala's 1568 usurpation, the 1614 succession crisis and Jaga Raya's coup, and the dynasty's long titular afterlife. Out of copyright.
30 citations · 10 chaptersT. Adolphus Trollope, A History of the Commonwealth of Florence, from the Earliest Independence of the Commune to the Fall of the Republic in 1531 (Chapman and Hall, 1865)
trollope-1865A continuous five-volume narrative, drawing extensively and directly on Machiavelli, Ammirato, Cavalcanti, Dino Compagni and other Florentine chroniclers, covering the whole span of this record: the earliest consular government (attested by 1102) and the Countess Matilda's 1115 death, the 1215 murder of Buondelmonte de' Buondelmonti that opened the Guelph-Ghibelline feud, the 1260 Battle of Montaperti, the 1293 Ordinances of Justice under Giano della Bella, the 1378 Ciompi Revolt and Michele di Lando, Cosimo de' Medici's 1433 exile and 1434 return, the 1478 Pazzi Conspiracy under Lorenzo the Magnificent, the 1494 expulsion of the Medici and Savonarola's republic, his 1498 execution, and the final Republic's defeat in the 1529-1530 Siege of Florence. Public domain, open access via archive.org (five separately scanned volumes).
29 citations · 10 chaptersGeorge Vernadsky, Kievan Russia, in A History of Russia, Volume II (Yale University Press, 1948)
vernadsky-1948The standard English-language academic history of the Kyiv-based period, running from the Varangian founding traditions to the Mongol invasion of 1237. Out of copyright.
29 citations · 8 chaptersIan Wood, The Merovingian Kingdoms, 450-751 (Longman, 1994)
wood-1994A scholarly history of Merovingian Gaul that also covers the Burgundian kingdom in detail: Gundobad's career in Roman Italy including his killing of the emperor Anthemius in 472, his war with Clovis and his brother Godegisel in 500, the Liber Constitutionum and the 517 Council of Epaon, King Sigismund's conversion, his 522 killing of his own son Sigistrix, his capture and death at Chlodomer's hands in 523, the 524 Battle of Vézeronce, and Godomar's own overthrow completing the Frankish conquest of Burgundy in 534. Open access via archive.org.
29 citations · 9 chaptersLeonard Y. Andaya, The Heritage of Arung Palakka: A History of South Sulawesi (Celebes) in the Seventeenth Century, in Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 91 (Martinus Nijhoff, 1981)
andaya-1981Written around the Bugis prince who fought for the Dutch company against Makassar and won South Sulawesi for himself, and therefore an account of the fall of Makassar from the side of the Sulawesi allies rather than from the company's. This site's Makassar record is coded from it and from Reid.
28 citations · 8 chaptersPeter Heather, The Goths, in The Peoples of Europe (Blackwell, 1996)
heather-1996Covers both Gothic successor kingdoms in one account, which is why this site's Visigothic and Ostrogothic records share it: Heather's argument is that Gothic identity was assembled in the fourth and fifth centuries out of several groups rather than carried out of Scandinavia, and both records are coded on that reading.
28 citations · 4 chaptersHomer B. Hulbert, The History of Korea, Volume II (Methodist Publishing House (Seoul), 1905)
hulbert-1905-v2The continuation of hulbert-1905, covering the Imjin War's final campaigns through the author's own present day. Its narrative thins into a year-by-year chronicle of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and stops in December 1904, partway through the Russo-Japanese War - before Korea's 1905 protectorate treaty or its 1910 annexation, neither of which this source can therefore speak to. Used here for Joseon's span from Yi Sŏng-gye's 1392 accession (carried over from Goryeo's own end) through the 1897 proclamation of the Korean Empire, including the 1636-37 Manchu invasion and siege of Namhan Fortress, the king's surrender ceremony, and Crown Prince Sado's 1762 death by his own father's order. Out of copyright.
28 citations · 9 chaptersK. W. Taylor, A History of the Vietnamese (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
taylor-2013Weighted toward the premodern centuries that most surveys of Vietnam hurry through, and written against the national narrative of a single continuous people resisting the north. This site's Dai Viet record follows it in treating the Ly and the Tran as a specific thing with a beginning and an end rather than as an early chapter of a country.
28 citations · 9 chaptersPierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (Eisenbrauns, 2002)
briant-200227 citations · 8 chaptersSima M. Ćirković, The Serbs, in The Peoples of Europe (Blackwell, 2004)
cirkovic-2004A one-volume history from the Slav settlement to the end of Yugoslavia, deliberately weighted towards socio-economic development rather than dynastic politics — which is why this site's Serbian institutions are coded from it. Ćirković is the authority on the medieval Serbian mining economy, and that is the field this record turns on.
27 citations · 6 chaptersBarry J. Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, 3rd edn (Routledge, 2018)
kemp-2018Not a narrative history but an account of how the Egyptian state actually worked — the redistributive economy, the temple estates, the mentality that held a uniform style across three thousand years. Kemp directs the excavation at Amarna, and this is the book the institutions on this site's Egyptian record are coded from, because a political narrative cannot supply them.
27 citations · 5 chaptersEgypt, Early Dynastic Period, Egypt, Middle Kingdom, Egypt, the Native Restoration, Egypt, New Kingdom, Egypt, Old Kingdom, Egypt, Saite Period, Egypt, Third Intermediate Period, The Hyksos
Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)
lane-1973Fifty years old and still the reference account, from the fifth century to the eighteenth. Lane was an economic historian and the book's centre of gravity is the shipping, the money and the constitution rather than the art, which is why this site's Venetian institutions are coded from it.
27 citations · 6 chaptersNehemia Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels (eds), The History of Islam in Africa (Ohio University Press, 2000)
levtzion-pouwels-2000Two dozen specialists on Islam in Africa region by region, and the only general work in this bibliography that treats Kanem-Bornu at length. This site's Kanem-Bornu institutions are coded from it, alongside the early Arabic notices in levtzion-hopkins-1981.
27 citations · 7 chaptersFrederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 7: The Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644, Part 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1988)
mote-twitchett-198827 citations · 7 chaptersEugene Schuyler, Turkistan: Notes of a Journey in Russian Turkistan, Khokand, Bukhara, and Kuldja (Sampson Low, London, 1876)
schuyler-1876The American consul at St Petersburg travelled through the newly conquered Russian territories and the surviving khanates in 1873, and wrote the fullest contemporary account in English of what the conquest looked like from inside. He is a diplomat with no stake in Russian self-congratulation and says so about the Khivan campaign; his appendix on Khokand is assembled from the Russian scholarly literature and from Chinese records, and is the only connected history of that khanate in English from the period. Out of copyright.
27 citations · 6 chaptersJohn V. A. Fine, The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest (University of Michigan Press, 1987)
fine-1987The companion volume, covering 1185 to the Ottoman conquest, and the source for this site's Second Bulgarian record. The two books together are why this corpus can carry Bulgaria twice with the same evidentiary footing on both sides of the interruption.
26 citations · 6 chaptersH. J. de Graaf and Th. G. Th. Pigeaud, De eerste Moslimse vorstendommen op Java: studiën over de staatkundige geschiedenis van de 15de en 16de eeuw, in Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 69 (Martinus Nijhoff, 1974)
graaf-pigeaud-1974The standard study of the first Muslim states on Java, and the first to work systematically from the Javanese babad and the Sadjarah Banten rather than from Portuguese and Dutch reports alone. Read here in the Indonesian translation, Kerajaan-Kerajaan Islam di Jawa, published in the Seri Terjemahan Javanologi. The authors are consistently explicit about which of their statements rest on chronicle, which on European report, and which on inference, which is what makes it usable for a sixteenth century whose documentation is this thin.
26 citations · 16 chaptersThe Sultanate of Banten, Sultanate of Cirebon, The Sultanate of Demak, The Sultanate of Mataram, The Kingdom of Pajang
Andrew J. Newman, Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire (I.B. Tauris, 2006)
newman-200626 citations · 5 chaptersW. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Medina (Clarendon Press, 1956)
watt-1956The standard study of the ten years at Medina treated as political history: how the community was governed, what its finances were, who actually held power, and how far Muhammad's authority extended at each stage. Its most useful feature for a record of the polity is that Watt separates the question of religious authority from the question of constitutional power and shows they moved at different speeds. Prints the so-called Constitution of Medina in full translation with the clause numbering established by Wensinck, and argues from its contents that Muhammad's formal powers in 622 were very slight.
26 citations · 9 chaptersDerek A. Welsby, The Kingdom of Kush: The Napatan and Meroitic Empires (British Museum Press, 1996)
welsby-1996The companion to welsby-2002 and by the same excavator, covering the thousand years upstream of it. Built from the archaeology as much as from the Egyptian and classical notices, which matters for a kingdom whose own language nobody can read.
26 citations · 7 chaptersIvor Wilks, Asante in the Nineteenth Century: The Structure and Evolution of a Political Order, in African Studies Series 13 (Cambridge University Press, 1975)
wilks-1975Eight hundred pages on how one African state actually worked — the bureaucracy, the roads, the treasury, the succession, the factions in council — and still the fullest institutional account of any sub-Saharan polity in this bibliography. It is why the Asante record can code three fields with confidence and why the fourth is empty for a reason the vocabulary cannot fix.
26 citations · 7 chaptersPeter H. Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016)
wilson-2016Published in Britain as The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe's History. Organised thematically rather than by reign — one section on the imperial ideal, one on territory, one on governance, one on society — which is what a record with eight hundred and forty-four years and no narrative spine requires, and why this site's institutions for it are coded from Wilson rather than from a chronicle.
26 citations · 5 chaptersRoger Collins, Visigothic Spain, 409-711, in A History of Spain (Blackwell, 2004)
collins-2004Combines chronology and theme, and argues against a good deal of the received account — of how the kingdom was governed, of its law, and of the Arab conquest. Collins had already written a book on that conquest, which is why this site's Visigothic record is drafted from him: its ending is the part every other page in the corpus points at.
25 citations · 4 chaptersTranslated by Robert Michell and Nevill Forbes, The Chronicle of Novgorod, 1016-1471, in Camden Third Series, Volume XXV (Camden Society / Royal Historical Society, 1914)
forbes-1914The standard English translation of the Novgorod First Chronicle, the city's own year-by-year record, with an introduction on the republic's institutions (the veche, the posadnik, the archbishop's role) and the 1471 crisis that ended Novgorod's independent relations with Moscow. Out of copyright.
25 citations · 7 chaptersJohn O. Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire (Brill, 1999)
hunwick-199925 citations · 7 chaptersColin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650: The Structure of Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)
imber-200225 citations · 6 chaptersJohn Howland Rowe, The Kingdom of Chimor, in Acta Americana, vol. 6 (1948)
rowe-1948The standard scholarly reconstruction of Chimú political history, built from a careful critical reading of the Anonymous History of Trujillo (1604) and other colonial sources - the Taycanamo founding legend, the real territorial conquests of his grandson Ñancen-pinco dated to around 1370, the reign of the last independent king Minchançaman, the unauthorized 1461-62 raid of the Inca general Capac Yupanqui and his execution for it, the proper Inca conquest of Chimor under Topa Capac and the young heir Topa Inca between 1462 and 1470, and the puppet dynasty and eventual fragmentation of the kingdom under Inca rule. Open access via archive.org.
25 citations · 9 chaptersCyril Toumanoff, Studies in Christian Caucasian History (Georgetown University Press, 1963)
toumanoff-1963Six hundred pages on the dynastic and social structure of Armenia, Iberia and Albania before the Bagratids, and the foundation of the field in English. Toumanoff's subject is the nakharar and eristavi houses rather than the kings — which is what this site's `client-levy` coding on three Caucasian records rests on.
25 citations · 5 chaptersCaucasian Albania, Kingdom of Iberia, Kingdom of Greater Armenia
Caroline Finkel, Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1923 (John Murray, 2005)
finkel-2005The standard single-volume narrative across the whole span, from the frontier beylik to the abolition of the sultanate. Imber's account stops at 1650, and Finkel is what carries the story from there: the wars with Russia, the nineteenth-century reforms, and the end.
24 citations · 4 chaptersAydinid Beylik, Karamanid Beylik, Ottoman Empire, Empire of Trebizond
Greg Fisher (ed.), Arabs and Empires before Islam (Oxford University Press, 2015)
fisher-2015Nearly two hundred and fifty translated extracts from Greek, Latin, Syriac, Persian and Arabic sources and from inscriptions in several alphabets, with commentary by more than twenty specialists. It is a sourcebook rather than a narrative, which suits a corpus whose rules are about what a source will actually carry: for pre-Islamic Arabia the evidence is inscriptions and other people's accounts, and this is where both are assembled.
24 citations · 7 chaptersStanley Lane-Poole, A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages (Methuen, 1901)
lane-poole-1901A narrative history built largely on al-Maqrizi, with the numismatic and documentary detail of a curator who had catalogued the coins himself. The judgements are of their period and are sometimes contemptuous of their subjects; the detail is checkable and carefully attributed. Cited here for the Fatimid library and for the abolition of the caliphate in 1171. Out of copyright.
24 citations · 22 chaptersAbbasid Caliphate of Cairo, Principality of Antioch, Ayyubid Sultanate, Fatimid Caliphate, Ikhshidid Emirate, Kingdom of Jerusalem, Mamluk Sultanate, County of Tripoli, Tulunid Emirate, Zangid Dynasty
B. C. McGing, The Foreign Policy of Mithridates VI Eupator, King of Pontus, in Mnemosyne Supplements 89 (Brill, 1986)
mcging-1986On diplomacy, strategy, propaganda and support rather than on battles, which suits a record whose most consequential single act was a massacre organised by correspondence. McGing is also careful about the dynasty's double descent claim, which this site counts on the Achaemenid record.
24 citations · 3 chaptersJames Wilson, Medieval Syria and the Onset of the Crusades: The Political World of Bilad al-Sham 1050-1128 (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
wilson-2023Reads the Seljuk arrival and the First Crusade from inside Syria rather than from either invading direction, and takes the local Arab, Kurdish and urban powers seriously as the actors they were rather than as the furniture two invasions rearranged. Cited for the polities this site added to close the gap between 1004 and 1102.
24 citations · 6 chaptersAmmarid Emirate of Tripoli, Mirdasid Emirate, Uqaylid Emirate
W. A. R. Wood, A History of Siam (T. Fisher Unwin, 1926)
wood-history-of-siam-1926A British consular official's narrative history of Siam, drawing on Siamese and Burmese chronicles. Cited here, in its account of the wars between Siam, Burma and the Lao kingdom, for King Jai Jett'a (Setthathirath) of Luang Prabang and Wiengchan - his 1547 accession, his wars with Burma, his 1571 disappearance in Cambodia, the Burmese vassalage that followed, and the 1779 Siamese conquest of Wiengchan under Taksin's general Chao Phya Chakri; and, on the Ayutthaya page, for the dynastic turnover of that kingdom's first eighty years (1351-1431), a period Baker and Pasuk's more recent scholarship is not openly accessible enough to draft from directly. Wood is explicit about where his chronicle sources disagree or strain credulity - he flags an alleged invasion of Chiang Mai under King Ramesuen as a probable chronologically-displaced interpolation, for instance, rather than repeating it as fact. Out of copyright.
24 citations · 8 chaptersThe Kingdom of Ayutthaya, Lan Xang (Luang Prabang and Vientiane)
R. E. Allen, The Attalid Kingdom: A Constitutional History (Clarendon Press, 1983)
allen-1983Built from the inscriptions rather than from the literary sources, which for a dynasty this poorly served by narrative historians is the only way to get at how the kingdom worked. This site's Attalid institutions are coded from it, and its account of the settlement of 188 is why that record's second turning point is a treaty rather than a battle.
23 citations · 4 chaptersAbbas Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (Yale University Press, 2017)
amanat-2017A thousand pages from the Safavid revolution to 2009 by a specialist in the nineteenth century, layering ideology, economy and the arts over the dynastic narrative. Cited for the Qajar record, where the political history alone would make the century look like a list of concessions.
23 citations · 7 chaptersChris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, A History of Ayutthaya: Siam in the Early Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2017)
baker-pasuk-2017The first full-length history of Ayutthaya in English, and the reason this site's Ayutthaya record carries the revenue coding of a port rather than of a rice kingdom: its central argument is that Ayutthaya lived on trade and on the products of forest and water, not on an agrarian surplus.
23 citations · 5 chaptersA. T. Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (Longmans, Green and Co., 1929)
bryant-zululand-1929A missionary and ethnographer who spent decades among the Zulu collecting oral tradition, cross-checked against the direct eyewitness accounts of the early European traders Henry Francis Fynn and Nathaniel Isaacs, who lived at Shaka's own court. Covers the Nguni clans of southeastern Africa from their earliest traditions through the rise of the Zulu kingdom under Shaka - his exiled childhood among the eLangeni and Mthethwa, his 1816 accession, the execution of his patron Dingiswayo in 1818, the 1827 mourning massacre following his mother Nandi's death, and his own assassination in 1828 - as well as the many neighboring Nguni peoples scattered or absorbed in the same period. The author is candid where his sources conflict or where tradition cannot be verified. Used here for the whole of the Zulu Kingdom's own record. Out of copyright.
23 citations · 7 chaptersSteven A. Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958-1528 (University of North Carolina Press, 1996)
epstein-1996The first comprehensive history of the republic in English, and unusually willing to say that the Genoese constitution did not work — which is the finding this site's Genoese succession field is coded around, and the reason the two maritime republics carry the same value with opposite results.
23 citations · 5 chaptersJohn V. A. Fine, Jr., The Bosnian Church: A New Interpretation - A Study of the Bosnian Church and Its Place in State and Society from the 13th to the 15th Centuries, in East European Monographs, no. X (East European Quarterly / Columbia University Press, 1975)
fine-1975-bosnian-churchA doctoral-thesis monograph arguing against both standard readings of the Bosnian Church (that it was a dualist heresy akin to the Bogomils, or that it was crypto-Orthodox) by working through the primary sources directly - papal and inquisitorial letters, Ragusan diplomatic correspondence, Bosnian royal charters, Gost Radin's 1466 will. Covers Ban Kulin's reign and the 1203 Bilino Polje renunciation, Stjepan Kotromanić, Tvrtko I's 1377 coronation, the Kotromanić-Kosača civil wars, Stefan Tomašević's 1461 coronation and the 1463 Ottoman conquest, and Hercegovina's own separate survival to 1481. Open access via archive.org.
23 citations · 7 chaptersGünther Hölbl, trans. Tina Saavedra, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (Routledge, 2001)
holbl-2001The standard narrative of the dynasty from Alexander's death to Actium, and the first general history of the Ptolemies since Bevan in 1928. Hölbl is an Egyptologist rather than a classicist, which is why the pharaonic half of the arrangement — the temple decrees, the ruler cult, the titulary — is present at all.
23 citations · 7 chaptersDonald Matthew, The Norman Kingdom of Sicily, in Cambridge Medieval Textbooks (Cambridge University Press, 1992)
matthew-1992Strongest on administration, which is what this record needs: the Sicilian kingdom's interest is that it ran an Arabic fiscal bureau, a Greek chancery and a Latin court at once, and Matthew is the account that explains how rather than simply noting it.
23 citations · 3 chaptersAndy Merrills and Richard Miles, The Vandals, in The Peoples of Europe (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)
merrills-miles-2010The first book in English on the North African kingdom, and explicitly a reinterpretation: against the reading of the Vandals as a raiding band that destroyed a province, Merrills and Miles describe a state with a fiscal apparatus, a court literature and a foreign policy. This site's Vandal institutions are coded from it.
23 citations · 3 chaptersVladimir Minorsky, A History of Sharvan and Darband in the 10th-11th Centuries (W. Heffer & Sons, 1958)
minorsky-1958An edition, translation and commentary of the local chronicle that is almost the only narrative source for the eastern Caucasus in these two centuries. It exists because Minorsky reconstructed the text from a later compilation; without it the Shirvanshahs would be a king-list with dates.
23 citations · 7 chaptersÁrmin Vámbéry, Travels in Central Asia (John Murray, London, 1864)
vambery-1864A Hungarian orientalist who crossed the Turkmen desert in 1863 disguised as a Sunni dervish returning from Mecca, and reached Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand — the first European to see all three and come back. He was lame, he spoke the languages, and detection meant slavery or death, so he took no notes where he could be seen and wrote much of it up afterwards. The narrative is an adventure; the second half of the book is a sober survey of the three khanates — their taxes, officials, armies, populations and histories — compiled from what he was told by people who had no idea they were talking to a European. Out of copyright.
23 citations · 6 chaptersA. B. Bosworth, Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great (Cambridge University Press, 1988)
ab-bosworth-1988A. B. Bosworth, the Alexander historian, not C. E. Bosworth, whose works on the Islamic dynasties are also cited here.
22 citations · 6 chaptersMichael Axworthy, The Sword of Persia: Nader Shah, from Tribal Warrior to Conquering Tyrant (I.B. Tauris, 2006)
axworthy-2006The first full study of Nader in English since Lockhart in 1938, and unusually good on the military question this corpus keeps running into: how an army was actually raised, paid and made to fight, and what it cost the country underneath it to keep one in the field.
22 citations · 6 chaptersAlexander Bruce Boswell, The Kipchak Turks (The Slavonic Review, Vol. 6, No. 16, 1927)
boswell-kipchak-1927A dedicated English-language academic survey of Cuman-Kipchak history, from their westward migration out of the Kirghiz steppe and entry into the European record in the eleventh century, through Bonyak's raids, Vladimir Monomakh's campaigns of 1103 and 1111, Konchak's war with Prince Igor, the Mongol conquest at the Kalka in 1223 and the reorganization of the steppe as the Golden Horde, to the afterlife of scattered Kipchak communities in Hungary, Bulgaria and the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt. Drawing on the Russian, Georgian and Hungarian chronicle traditions along with western travelers' accounts. Used here for the whole of the Cuman-Kipchak confederation's own record.
22 citations · 6 chaptersC. E. Bosworth, The Ghaznavids: Their Empire in Afghanistan and Eastern Iran, 994-1040 (Edinburgh University Press, 1963)
bosworth-196322 citations · 5 chaptersTrevor Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, new edn (Oxford University Press, 2005)
bryce-2005The narrative history of Bronze Age Anatolia in English, revised from the 1998 first edition. Dates on this site's Hittite record follow Bryce's middle chronology; the absolute dates are not secure and the page says so.
22 citations · 5 chaptersGeorge G. Cameron, History of Early Iran (University of Chicago Press, 1936)
cameron-1936A narrative source only; its own absolute chronology uses an older "long" system now superseded (it dates Ibi-Sin's accession to 2207), so this corpus takes absolute dates for events it also covers - the fall of Ur - from crawford-2013 and king-1910 instead. Still the fullest freely available narrative treatment of the Awan, Shimashki and Sukkalmah dynasties that preceded the Middle Elamite kingdom. Out of copyright.
22 citations · 5 chaptersHarriet Crawford (ed.), The Sumerian World, in Routledge Worlds (Routledge, 2013)
crawford-2013Thirty-two specialists on southern Mesopotamia from 3000 to 2000 BC, organised by theme rather than by reign. This site's Ur III institutions are coded from it, because the questions the institution fields ask — what an army was paid with, what a state's income consisted of — are answered in this corpus by thematic handbooks and almost never by a narrative of kings.
22 citations · 4 chaptersIbn Khaldun, Histoire des Berbères et des dynasties musulmanes de l'Afrique septentrionale (Imprimerie du Gouvernement, Algiers, 1852)
ibn-khaldun-de-slaneThe narrative half of the work whose introduction is the Muqaddima, in the four-volume French translation made for the French army in Algeria. Cited here for the Almoravids, the Almohads and the Hafsids, where it is the fullest connected account there is and often the only one: Ibn Khaldun held office under the Hafsids, his own great-grandfather sat on the council that governed Seville in 1248, and for the fourteenth century he is a witness rather than a compiler. He is correspondingly partial — his Hafsid patrons are "our lord the sultan", the Arab tribes of the interior are wolves and dogs — and his transcribed dates go wrong often enough that de Slane corrects them in the notes. Also cited for the Zayyanid record's own Abu Hammu Musa II, whose court Ibn Khaldun served directly: his 1358-59 restoration to Tlemcen with Dawawida Arab backing, the 1366 Bejaia campaign that ended in betrayal and defeat, and his 1389 assassination, bound up with the freedman Hilal and his own son Abu Tashfin II. Out of copyright.
22 citations · 13 chaptersAlmohad Caliphate, Almoravid Empire, Hafsid Sultanate, Marinid Sultanate, Zayyanid Kingdom of Tlemcen
Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (Cambridge University Press, 1999)
jackson-199922 citations · 6 chaptersLeonard William King, A History of Babylon: From the Foundation of the Monarchy to the Persian Conquest (Chatto and Windus, 1915)
king-1915King's own sequel to king-1910, carrying the same survey forward from Hammurabi's fall through the Kassite dynasty. Its absolute chronology is superseded - the appended king-list dates the First Dynasty three centuries too high - so this corpus draws only its narrative content from it and takes absolute dates from taagepera-1997 instead. Out of copyright.
22 citations · 7 chaptersLivy, The History of Rome (Everyman's Library, 1912)
livy-robertsWriting under Augustus, four and a half centuries after the traditional founding, working substantially from earlier annalists whose own work is lost and from a native Roman tradition of family and civic legend rather than from contemporary documents for the earliest material. Livy says so himself in his preface, distinguishing what can be established from what is transmitted because it is fitting to the greatness of the subject. Used here for the kings, the expulsion, and the early Conflict of the Orders, where he is substantially the only continuous narrative that survives at all. Out of copyright.
22 citations · 7 chaptersCesar Adib Majul, Muslims in the Philippines (University of the Philippines Press, 1973)
majul-1973Published for the Asian Center at Quezon City, and the standard account of the Sulu and Maguindanao sultanates written from Philippine Muslim sources alongside the Spanish ones. This site's Sulu record is coded from it.
22 citations · 6 chaptersK. A. Nilakanta Sastri, The Colas (University of Madras, 1955)
nilakanta-sastri-1955Madras University Historical Series No. 9, second revised edition, the classic single-volume political history of the Chola dynasty from Vijayalaya's capture of Tanjore through Rajendra III's defeat by the revived Pandya kingdom in 1279, built almost entirely from stone and copper-plate inscriptions rather than court chronicles - Chola kings left thousands of dated inscriptions and no continuous narrative history of their own. Used here for the Chola Empire's span, rulers, the conquest of Ceylon, the Ganges expedition, the dynasty's end, and its afterlife as a name without a throne - the Cholamandalam country-name that survived into the European "Coromandel," and local chieftains still invoking Chola titles as late as a dated 1554 grant made under Vijayanagara suzerainty. Out of copyright.
22 citations · 5 chaptersJohn R. Perry, Karim Khan Zand: A History of Iran, 1747-1779, in Publications of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies 12 (University of Chicago Press, 1979)
perry-1979The monograph on the one ruler in this region's six hundred years whom Iranians remember warmly, and on the thirty years of recovery he ran from Shiraz while declining to call himself shah.
22 citations · 6 chaptersAnthony Reid, An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and Other Histories of Sumatra (Singapore University Press, 2005)
reid-2005Forty years of work on Sumatra, weighted toward Aceh, and the source this site's Aceh record is coded from. It is a collection of studies rather than a continuous narrative, which is why the span dates on that record come from it only where it states them.
22 citations · 2 chaptersAndrew M. Smith II, Roman Palmyra: Identity, Community, and State Formation (Oxford University Press, 2013)
smith-2013Reads Palmyra from its own inscriptions and archaeology as a community that built a state, rather than as the backdrop to thirteen famous years. The emphasis matters for this site: the caravan city is the polity, and Zenobia is what it did once.
22 citations · 6 chaptersAndrea Trameri, The Land of Kizzuwatna: History of Cilicia in the Second Millennium BCE until the Hittite Conquest (ca. 2000-1350), in PhD dissertation, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University (2020)
trameri-2020The most detailed modern treatment of Kizzuwatna available, built around a close re-reading of every treaty, seal and contract naming a Kizzuwatnean king. Used here for the Kizzuwatna record throughout; its own conclusions are frequently framed as the more defensible of several competing scholarly reconstructions rather than settled fact, and this record follows that framing where the source itself does.
22 citations · 5 chaptersTrương Vĩnh Ký, Cours d'histoire annamite à l'usage des écoles de la Basse-Cochinchine (Imprimerie du Gouvernement, 1875)
truong-vinh-ky-1875A Vietnamese scholar's own survey of Annamite history, written in French for use in colonial-era schools and drawing on the Vietnamese dynastic annals. Used here for Le Loi's coronation in 1428 following the poisoning of the puppet Tran king Tran Cao and the end of the Ming occupation; Le Thanh Tong's 1460 coronation at eighteen; his 1471 campaign against Champa, the storming of the capital Cha Ban, the capture and death of the Cham king Tra Toan, and the partition of Champa into three principalities; and the fall of Le Chieu Thong, the dynasty's twenty-seventh and last king, who fled to Qing China after the Tay Son's defeat of the Qing intervention force and was kept under guard in Beijing from 1789, never permitted to return. Out of copyright.
22 citations · 7 chaptersGreg Woolf, Rome: An Empire's Story (Oxford University Press, 2012)
woolf-201222 citations · 8 chaptersMichael Aung-Thwin, Pagan: The Origins of Modern Burma (University of Hawaii Press, 1985)
aung-thwin-1985Built on the Old Burmese donative inscriptions, and the source of the argument this site's Pagan record is coded around: that the kingdom was undone by the accumulation of tax-exempt monastic land rather than by the Mongols. It is a contested reading and the record says so.
21 citations · 6 chaptersMustafa Banister, The Abbasid Caliphate of Cairo, 1261-1517: Out of the Shadows, in Edinburgh Studies in Classical Islamic History and Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2021)
banister-2021The full-length study of the line this site counted as the Abbasids' only successor claim while describing it nowhere. Its argument is against the dismissal in its own subtitle — that a caliphate with no territory, army or revenue was nonetheless doing work, and that reading these men purely as figureheads is a judgement inherited from hostile brevity rather than one made from the record.
21 citations · 4 chaptersAbbasid Caliphate of Cairo, Mamluk Sultanate, Muzaffarid Dynasty
Michal Biran, The Empire of the Qara Khitai in Eurasian History: Between China and the Islamic World, in Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
biran-2005The first monograph in a Western language on a dynasty four chapters of this site were already leaning on. Used for the whole Qara Khitai record: the Chinese imperial forms retained two thousand miles from China, the indirect rule through Muslim vassals, and the religious policy that its last ruler reversed.
21 citations · 4 chaptersC. E. Bosworth, The History of the Saffarids of Sistan and the Maliks of Nimruz (247/861 to 949/1542-3) (Mazda Publishers, 1994)
bosworth-199421 citations · 6 chaptersMichael Brett, The Fatimid Empire (Edinburgh University Press, 2017)
brett-201721 citations · 5 chaptersTaef Kamal El-Azhari, The Saljuqs of Syria During the Crusades, 463-549 A.H./1070-1154 A.D., in Islamkundliche Untersuchungen 211 (Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1997)
el-azhari-1997The study of the Syrian Seljuk principalities and the atabeg houses that replaced them, which is the institution this site had described five times — Zangi at Mosul, Nur al-Din, the Burids at Damascus — without ever citing a work about it. Ends in 1154, the year Damascus falls to Nur al-Din, which is where the region's record picks up again.
21 citations · 5 chaptersR. Gopalan, History of the Pallavas of Kanchi (University of Madras, 1928)
gopalan-1928A dedicated dynastic history of the Pallavas from their obscure origins through Narasimhavarman I's reign and the dynasty's end at Chola hands under Aditya I and Aparajita. Used here for the Pallava record's founding, Simhavishnu and Mahendravarman I's reigns (including Mahendravarman's conversion to Shaivism and his own Sanskrit play Mattavilasa Prahasana), Narasimhavarman I's reign, Nandivarman II's contested "election" to the throne and alliance with the Rashtrakuta Dantidurga, and its 9th-century fall.
21 citations · 5 chaptersG. E. Harvey, History of Burma: From the Earliest Times to 10 March 1824 (Longmans, Green and Co., 1925)
harvey-1925A colonial-era narrative history built on the Burmese chronicles and the Old Burmese inscriptions alike, cited here for Narapatisithu's violent accession in 1173, the 1180 Sinhalese naval raid provoked by his own trade sanctions, his temple-building programme at Pagan, and the succession story that produced his eventual heir Htilominlo. Out of copyright.
21 citations · 6 chaptersPeter Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion (Yale University Press, 2017)
jackson-201721 citations · 8 chaptersRosamond McKitterick, Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
mckitterick-200821 citations · 6 chaptersLewis Henry Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (Sage & Brother, 1851)
morgan-iroquois-1851An ethnographer's account written with the collaboration of Ely S. Parker, a Seneca sachem, drawing on Iroquois oral tradition alongside colonial and early US records. Cited here for the confederacy's own account of its founding by Dekanawida (rendered Da-ga-no-we'-da), the structure of the fifty sachemships and the five founding nations, the 1715 admission of the Tuscaroras as a sixth nation, the confederacy's political collapse following the American Revolution, the reservation era that followed - the dispersal of the nations, the Ogden Land Company's dispossession of the Seneca, and the population and territory Morgan himself surveyed as contemporary "present condition" - and Handsome Lake's religious reformation from around 1800, carried on after his 1815 death by his grandson Sosehawa, whose recitation of the doctrine at an 1848 Tonawanda council Morgan's own collaborator, the Seneca sachem Ely S. Parker, translated for this book.
21 citations · 6 chaptersSallust (translated by Alfred W. Pollard), The Catiline and Jugurtha of Sallust, Translated into English (Macmillan and Co., 1882)
sallust-jugurtha-pollard-1882A clean English prose translation of Sallust's own contemporary account of the Jugurthine War (111-105 BC), written by a Roman historian a generation after the events it describes. Covers Jugurtha's youth and adoption by Micipsa, Hiempsal's murder, Adherbal's appeal to the Senate and death at Cirta, the war's corrupt early conduct at Rome (including Jugurtha's own visit under safe-conduct and the murder of Massiva), and the war's military conclusion with Jugurtha's betrayal by Bocchus of Mauretania and capture by Sulla. Sallust's own narrative breaks off at the capture; the translator's explanatory notes, drawing on other ancient sources, supply Jugurtha's subsequent death in the Tullianum and the kingdom's passage to Gauda, used here on that basis alongside the primary text itself. Used here for Numidia's own succession crisis and the whole of the Jugurthine War, and for Mauretania's own first appearance in the record under King Bocchus. Out of copyright.
21 citations · 6 chaptersGraham Saunders, A History of Brunei (Oxford University Press, 1994)
saunders-1994The only full-length history of the sultanate from its beginnings, and careful about the difference between what the European sources record and what the Brunei genealogies claim. This site's Brunei record follows it in both.
21 citations · 5 chaptersE. Mary Smallwood, The Jews under Roman Rule: From Pompey to Diocletian. A Study in Political Relations, in Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 20 (Brill, 1976)
smallwood-1976Fifty years old and still the standard political narrative of Judaea from 63 BC to the third century. Its subject is the relationship rather than the religion, which is what a corpus of polities needs: it is precise about who held which territory under what arrangement, in a period where that changed constantly and where most accounts are organised around something else.
21 citations · 3 chaptersJohn Masson Smith, Jr., The History of the Sarbadar Dynasty 1336-1381 A.D. and its Sources, in Publications in Near and Middle East Studies, Series A, 11 (Mouton, 1970)
smith-1970The monograph on a polity that is hard to write about because its own records do not survive and the chronicles that describe it were written by people who disapproved. Smith works the coins and the inscriptions alongside the literary sources, which matters here: the numismatic evidence is most of what establishes who was actually ruling in a state that changed rulers a dozen times in forty-four years.
21 citations · 5 chaptersR. Malcolm Errington, A History of Macedonia, in Hellenistic Culture and Society (University of California Press, 1990)
errington-1990Translated by Catherine Errington from the German of 1986. Its emphasis is the structure of the Macedonian state and how it worked rather than the campaigns, which is what this site's Antigonid institutions need — and its caution about the constitutional role of the Macedonian army assembly is the reason that record's succession field is null.
20 citations · 3 chaptersL. P. Harvey, Islamic Spain, 1250 to 1500 (University of Chicago Press, 1990)
harvey-1990The standard account of the two and a half centuries between the fall of Seville and the fall of Granada, covering the Nasrid emirate and the Muslim communities living under Christian rule alongside it. Cited for the Nasrid record, which needed a source that treats the period as something other than an epilogue.
20 citations · 5 chaptersMark Horton and John Middleton, The Swahili: The Social Landscape of a Mercantile Society, in The Peoples of Africa (Blackwell, 2000)
horton-middleton-2000An archaeologist and an anthropologist writing together, which is what the Swahili coast requires: the documentary record is thin and late and the excavated one is enormous. Their central argument — that Swahili society is African and coastal rather than a colony of anybody — is the one this site's Kilwa record's `legitimation` field is coded against.
20 citations · 6 chaptersR. Stephen Humphreys, From Saladin to the Mongols: The Ayyubids of Damascus 1193-1260 (State University of New York Press, 1977)
humphreys-197720 citations · 5 chaptersSir John Edward Lloyd, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, Volume II (Longmans, Green and Co., 1912)
lloyd-wales-v2-1912The standard scholarly history of medieval Wales, drawing on the Welsh chronicle Brut y Tywysogyon, English chronicles and the Rymer and Rolls Series document collections. Used here for the battle of Bryn Derwin in the summer of 1255, in which Llywelyn ap Gruffudd defeated and captured his own brothers Owain and Dafydd in a single hour, securing sole rule of Gwynedd; the Treaty of Montgomery, agreed 25 September 1267 and sworn at Rhyd Chwima on the 29th, by which King Henry III recognized Llywelyn as Prince of Wales; and Llywelyn's death on 11 December 1282 near Cilmeri, struck down by an English soldier, Stephen Frankton, who did not know whom he had killed until the body was later identified - after which his head was sent to Edward I and displayed before being sent on to London, his body buried at the abbey of Cwm Hir, and his infant daughter Gwenllian, his only child, confined for life as a nun at Sempringham. Out of copyright.
20 citations · 3 chaptersRobert Nunez Lyne, Zanzibar in Contemporary Times: A Short History of the Southern East in the Nineteenth Century (Hurst and Blackett, 1905)
lyne-1905A former Zanzibar Government official's narrative history, drawn from official correspondence, the Zanzibar Gazette and the author's own residence on the island, running from the last years of Sayyid Said through the 1896 bombardment and into the British Protectorate's early administration. Used here for the Sultanate of Zanzibar's own span: the 1861 Canning Award separating Zanzibar from Muscat under Seyyid Majid, Seyyid Barghash's reign - Frere's 1873 anti-slave-trade mission, the 1885 "German surprise" in which a squadron forced acceptance of German claims on the mainland, and the subsequent loss of most of that mainland through delimitation - and the 1896 bombardment, dated here to the night of August 25 (Hamid bin Thuwaini's sudden death and Khaled bin Barghash's seizure of the palace) through the morning of August 27 (the ultimatum and the thirty-seven-minute bombardment itself), which a separate passage in the same book misdates Hamid's own death to August 27; the fuller, dedicated chapter's day-by-day account is preferred here. Out of copyright.
20 citations · 4 chaptersF. E. Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (Princeton University Press, 1994)
peters-1994A collage of primary accounts across the whole span, Muslim and Western, with Peters' commentary between them. Cited for the long view this site needed on a polity that lasted nine and a half centuries and for which no single political narrative exists in English.
20 citations · 5 chaptersK. A. Nilakanta Sastri, The Pandyan Kingdom: From the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century (Luzac & Co., 1929)
sastri-1929-pandyanA dedicated dynastic history of the Pandya kingdom running from its ancient beginnings through its medieval revival and the Delhi Sultanate's destruction of it under Malik Kafur in 1311, into the short-lived Madurai Sultanate and the kingdom's final absorption into Vijayanagara. Used here for the Pandya record's span and end.
20 citations · 3 chaptersCaptain John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (Michael Sparkes, 1624)
smith-1624Smith's own compilation, combining his eyewitness account of 1607-1609 with reports from later colonists he names and credits individually, covering the Jamestown colony's dealings with Powhatan's paramount chiefdom from first contact through the 1624 revocation of the Virginia Company's charter. Used here for Powhatan's own court at Werowocomoco and his rule over the Tidewater confederacy as Smith found it in 1607, the 1613 capture and 1614 marriage of Pocahontas to John Rolfe that ended the first Anglo-Powhatan war, Powhatan's death in April 1618 and the succession of his brothers Itopatin and then Opechancanough, and the massacre of March 22, 1622, which Smith's account attributes to Opechancanough and dates precisely, giving a toll of 347 English dead. The source's own narrative does not reach an institutional end: Opechancanough's own paramountcy, and the war his 1622 massacre opened, continued for more than two decades after Smith's account stops, well past Smith's own 1631 death. Written by a participant with his own reputation to defend and his own quarrels with fellow colonists; read with that in mind. Out of copyright.
20 citations · 4 chaptersTaddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia, 1270-1527, in Oxford Studies in African Affairs (Clarendon Press, 1972)
tamrat-1972The book that established the field, on the two and a half centuries in which the Solomonic dynasty, the monasteries and the expansion into the south were all one process. This site's Ethiopian institutions are coded from it for the medieval period, and its account of the gult and the itinerant court is why that record's `capitals` field carries a comment.
20 citations · 4 chaptersBasil Thomson, The Diversions of a Prime Minister (William Blackwood and Sons, 1894)
thomson-1894A memoir by the British official who served as Tonga's acting Premier in the early 1890s, built around a long inserted "Sketch of the History of Tonga" that draws on native chants and genealogies collected from Tongan informants, on the missionary and voyager record from Tasman (1643) and Cook (1777) onward, and on an appendix king-list of the Tui Tonga supplied by Rev. J. E. Moulton. Thomson treats the reign of Kau-ulu-fonua - whose accession as Tui Tonga he dates to circa 1535, after his father Takalaua's murder - as the point from which Tongan tradition stops being "too disconnected" to trust and starts being history. Used here for Kau-ulu-fonua's reconquest of the wider Tongan tribute zone and his creation of the Tui Haatakalaua office, and for the further delegation of temporal power to Ngata as the first Tui Kanokupolu, which Thomson's own computation from the king-list dates to about 1610 and treats as completing the separation of the sacred Tui Tonga from effective political rule. Not used for anything after 1610: the same sketch continues for centuries further, through European contact and into Thomson's own time, and that later material belongs to a different, still-continuing Tongan polity, not to the one drawn from here. Out of copyright.
20 citations · 4 chaptersMarc Van De Mieroop, King Hammurabi of Babylon: A Biography, in Blackwell Ancient Lives (Blackwell, 2005)
van-de-mieroop-2005The institutions on this site's Old Babylonian record are coded from it. Van De Mieroop's argument is that Hammurabi's reputation as a lawgiver has obscured a career that was mostly diplomacy and a state that mostly did not outlive him, which is the shape that record takes.
20 citations · 6 chaptersThomas Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, Volume I - The Islands and Their Inhabitants (Alexander Heylin, 1858)
williams-1858A Wesleyan missionary's ethnography and history of Fiji, drawn from his own residence there and the mission's own records, published alongside a second volume of mission history by James Calvert (not used here). Covers Bau's rise under the Vunivalu title "Root of War," the succession of Na-Ulivou (d. 1829) by his brother Tanoa; the seven-year civil war that drove Tanoa into exile and the covert coup, led by his young son Seru, that restored him around 1837 and won Seru the name Thakombau ("evil to Mbau," for the terror of the coup itself); Tanoa's death on 8 December 1852 and Thakombau's succession; the 26 January 1855 death of Ratu Nggara of Rewa, the Tongan-brokered peace that followed, and the return of some seventy towns to Bau's allegiance; and Thakombau's own public baptism on 11 January 1857. Published in 1858, before Thakombau's later assumption of the title Tui Viti and the 1874 cession of Fiji to Britain - neither event is covered here, and the record drawn from this source ends at the point the source itself does, with Bau's supremacy consolidated rather than any Fijian kingdom ceded or ended. Out of copyright.
20 citations · 4 chaptersMadawi Al-Rasheed, Politics in an Arabian Oasis: The Rashidi Tribal Dynasty, in Society and Culture in the Modern Middle East (I.B. Tauris, 1991)
al-rasheed-1991The monograph on the dynasty that beat the Saudis in the nineteenth century and lost to them in the twentieth, and on the wider question it raises: why a camel-herding confederation became susceptible to political centralisation at that particular moment, and why the result did not last.
19 citations · 5 chaptersNeil Christie, The Lombards: The Ancient Longobards, in The Peoples of Europe (Blackwell, 1995)
christie-1995History and archaeology together, from the invasion of 568 to Charlemagne taking the kingdom in 774. Christie is unusually useful for a record whose central difficulty is that the written sources are two centuries later than the events and were written to justify what had happened.
19 citationsFrancesco Saverio Clavigero, trans. Charles Cullen, The History of Mexico (1787)
clavigero-1787An 18th-century Jesuit history compiled from Spanish and Mexican sources, manuscripts and pictorial histories, covering the migration and 1325 founding of Tenochtitlan, the reign and election of Itzcoatl, the 1428 war against Azcapotzalco and formation of the Triple Alliance, Moctezuma I, Ahuitzotl's 1486 dedication of the Great Temple with mass sacrifice, and the omens and portents preceding Moctezuma II's reign and the Spanish arrival. Public domain, open access via archive.org (two volumes).
19 citations · 5 chaptersMoshe Gammer, Muslim Resistance to the Tsar: Shamil and the Conquest of Chechnia and Daghestan (Frank Cass, 1994)
gammer-1994The standard study, worked from Russian, Arabic and Turkish archives, of a polity that held out against an empire for a quarter of a century in country the empire could reach and could not hold. Its subject is as much the state Shamil built as the war he fought with it, which is what this site needs: the institutions are the reason the resistance lasted.
19 citations · 5 chaptersPietro Giannone, trans. Capt. James Ogilvie, The Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, Volume II (1729)
giannone-1729A translation of Giannone's own 1723 Istoria Civile, covering, in continuous narrative alongside its institutional and legal history, the 1302 peace ending the Vespers war and splitting Sicily from the mainland, Andrew of Hungary's 1345 strangling and Queen Joanna I's own 1382 murder by Charles of Durazzo, Alfonso the Magnanimous's 1442 conquest of Naples through its aqueduct, and the 1501 secret partition treaty and 1503 Spanish conquest under Gonzalo de Córdoba that ended independent Neapolitan kingship for two centuries. A separate, complete two-volume translation (vol. II covering the Anjevin, Aragonese and Austrian kings to 1723) also covers viceroy Don Pedro de Toledo's 1547 attempt to introduce the Inquisition and the revolt that stopped it, and the catastrophic 1656 plague. Public domain, open access via archive.org.
19 citations · 7 chaptersHeinz Halm, The Empire of the Mahdi: The Rise of the Fatimids (Brill, 1996)
halm-199619 citations · 5 chaptersAghlabid Emirate, Fatimid Caliphate, Midrarid Emirate of Sijilmasa, Rustamid Imamate
H.E.D. Pollock, Ralph L. Roys, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, A. Ledyard Smith, Mayapan, Yucatan, Mexico, in Carnegie Institution of Washington, Publication 619 (Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1962)
mayapan-1962The standard study of Mayapan, combining Roys's translation and analysis of the native chronicles and colonial Spanish accounts (Landa, Ciudad Real, the Chronicles of Chumayel and Tizimin) with Proskouriakoff's and Smith's archaeological survey of the city's wall, civic structures and residential zones - covering the founding attributed to Kukulcan, the joint government of resident provincial lords, the Cocom family's rise to dominance around 1380, their use of Mexican mercenary garrisons, the Xiu-led revolt and massacre of the Cocom in Katun 8 Ahau (A.D. 1441-1461), and the division of Yucatan into sixteen independent states after the city's destruction. Open access via archive.org.
19 citations · 7 chaptersDavid Morgan, The Mongols, 2nd edn (Blackwell, 2007)
morgan-2007Used for the Mongol campaigns and for the sceptical handling of the casualty figures the medieval sources give.
19 citations · 6 chaptersG. Rex Smith, The Ayyubids and Early Rasulids in the Yemen (567-694/1173-1295), in E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, New Series XXVI (Trustees of the E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, 1974)
smith-1974An edition, translation and study of Ibn Hatim's chronicle, which is the fullest source for Yemen from Turanshah's conquest to the point where the Ayyubids' own followers had replaced them. Two volumes, 1974 and 1978.
19 citations · 5 chaptersHendi Sopian and Norhidayat, Silsilah Dan Perkembangan Kerajaan Kutai Kartanegara (1300-1732), in Amarthapura: Historical Studies Journal, vol. 1 no. 2 (2022)
sopian-norhidayat-2022A genealogical and narrative history of Kutai Kartanegara from its 1300 founding by Aji Batara Agung Dewa Sakti through the Islamic conversion, the 1605-1635 conquest of the older Hindu kingdom at Muara Kaman (ending the Mulawarman dynasty attested by the Yupa inscriptions) and the resulting merged title "Kutai Kartanegara Ing Martadipura," to 1732. Cites J.Ph. Vogel's 1918 Yupa inscription study directly for the older kingdom's own dating. Creative Commons licensed, open access.
19 citations · 5 chaptersEdited and translated by A. Teeuw and D. K. Wyatt, Hikayat Patani: The Story of Patani, in Bibliotheca Indonesica 5, Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (Martinus Nijhoff, 1970)
teeuw-wyatt-1970The Patani court chronicle in Malay with an English translation and a commentary that is longer than the text. It is the internal source for a sultanate whose archive was destroyed twice, and like the Sejarah Melayu on this site's Melaka record it was written by people arguing about a succession while it was still open.
19 citations · 6 chaptersBarbara Watson Andaya, To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (University of Hawaii Press, 1993)
andaya-b-1993The standard study of Palembang and Jambi together, built on Dutch and English company records read against Malay ideas of kinship and of the relation between an upstream and a downstream. Not to be confused with Leonard Y. Andaya, a different historian of the same period and region; this site's Palembang record is coded from Barbara Watson Andaya's book specifically.
18 citations · 5 chaptersWilliam Coelho, The Hoysala Vamsa (Indian Historical Research Institute, St. Xavier's College, 1950)
coelho-1950A dedicated dynastic history of the Hoysalas from their obscure hill-chieftain origins through Vishnuvardhana's and Vira Ballala II's reigns to the dynasty's destruction under Vira Ballala III and IV during the Delhi Sultanate's Deccan campaigns of the 1310s-40s. Used here for the Hoysala record's founding, peak and end.
18 citations · 3 chaptersGeorge Dennis, The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (John Murray, 1848)
dennis-etruria-1848A two-volume travelogue-survey of the Etruscan sites, organised city by city rather than chronologically, drawing on Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and the epigraphic and archaeological record known in Dennis's own day. Cited here for the legendary founding of the Twelve Cities, the Confederation's own wars with early Rome (the battle of the Arsian Wood, Lars Porsena), the 396 BC fall of Veii under Camillus, and the long fourth- and third-century BC wars ending at the second battle of the Vadimonian Lake in 283 BC.
18 citations · 7 chaptersAntoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, The History of Louisiana (T. Becket, 1774)
dupratz-louisiana-1774An English edition of a French colonist's memoir of sixteen years in Louisiana, eight of them living among the Natchez as an intimate friend of the reigning Great Sun. Cited here for the Natchez origin tradition and matrilineal succession law, the 1723 conflict over a debt of corn, the 1725 funeral of Tattooed Serpent (which du Pratz personally attended), the 1729 massacre triggered by Commandant Chopart's seizure of the White Apple village's land, and the 1730 siege, capture and deportation of the nation to Saint-Domingue.
18 citations · 5 chaptersHydatius of Aquae Flaviae, The Chronicle of Hydatius: Translation and Overview, in Translated by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, based on R. W. Burgess's critical edition (The Chronicle of Hydatius and the Consularia Constantinopolitana, Oxford, 1993) (2023)
hydatius-tamimiA contemporary chronicle by a Catholic bishop of Aquae Flaviae, written in Gallaecia itself through the mid-fifth century - the only surviving eyewitness narrative source for the Suebic kingdom's own formation, and the source this corpus's Suebi record draws on for the reigns of Hermeric, Rechila, Rechiarius and Remismund. Coverage ends around 468-9, close to the chronicler's own death; nothing here addresses the kingdom's sixth-century history or its 585 conquest.
18 citations · 5 chaptersVladimir Minorsky, Studies in Caucasian History: New Light on the Shaddadids of Ganja; The Shaddadids of Ani; Prehistory of Saladin, in Cambridge Oriental Series 6 (Cambridge University Press, 1953)
minorsky-1953Three studies and an appendix on the Musafirids and Rawwadids, which between them are the scholarship on the Muslim dynasties of the eastern Caucasus. The third essay is on Saladin's family before it was famous, which is worth noting on a site whose Ayyubid record begins in Egypt: the Ayyubids came out of Shaddadid service at Dvin.
18 citations · 4 chaptersJohn F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (The New Cambridge History of India, I.5) (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
richards-199318 citations · 4 chaptersPatricia Risso, Oman and Muscat: An Early Modern History (Croom Helm, 1986)
risso-1986On how an Arabian principality came to project political and commercial power into both East Africa and India, and on the tribal politics and the religious office underneath that. Cited for the two Omani records this site added after its own Ibadi imamate page had listed the later imamates by name to explain why it stopped in 893.
18 citations · 4 chaptersF. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, Second Edition, in The Oxford History of England, vol. 2 (1947)
stenton-1947-2edThe standard scholarly narrative of Anglo-Saxon England, cited here from a second, revised edition distinct from the first edition (1943) already used for wessex. Used here for Æthelbald of Mercia's murder by his own bodyguard at Seckington in 757; the civil war that followed between Beornred and Offa, both descended from Penda's brother Eowa, and Offa's exile of Beornred before the year was out; and the battle of Ellendun in 825, in which Egbert of Wessex defeated Beornwulf of Mercia - "the ascendancy of the Mercian kings came to an end," in the author's own words - followed by Beornwulf's death at the hands of the East Angles later the same year. Open access via a Digital Library of India scan on archive.org.
18 citations · 3 chaptersGeorge McCall Theal, History of South Africa since September 1795, Vol. IV: The Orange Free State, the South African Republic, Zululand, Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Matabeleland from 1854 to 1872 (Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1908)
theal-1908-v4Continues theal-1908-v2. Used here for the Matabele resettlement near the Matopo hills after the flight from the Marikwa, Moselekatse's death in October 1868, the regency of the induna Nombati, the search for and rejection of a claimant to the throne of the missing heir Kuruman, and Lobengula's installation on January 24, 1870, followed by his victory in the civil war against the faction that backed the Natal claimant. Out of copyright.
18 citations · 3 chaptersSuhayl Zakkar, The Emirate of Aleppo, 1004-1094 (Dar al-Amanah, 1971)
zakkar-1971The monograph on the ninety years between the Hamdanids and the Seljuks, which is the century this region's record skipped. Zakkar is the standard account of the Mirdasid emirate and of the Kilab, and is quoted in every later treatment for the judgement that the tribe "served those who paid most and often, at a time of crisis, would sell their employer to the highest bidder" — which is a description of a revenue basis, not a moral complaint.
18 citations · 3 chaptersMary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (Profile Books, 2015)
beard-2015The standard modern narrative history of Rome from the Kingdom through the early Empire, used here as the primary source for the Republic's own record for the same reason Woolf's book carries the Roman Empire record: a comprehensive single-volume account against which the primary-source chapters can be checked and dated.
17 citations · 6 chaptersChristopher I. Beckwith, The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia (Princeton University Press, 1987)
beckwith-198717 citations · 4 chaptersG. W. Bowersock, Roman Arabia (Harvard University Press, 1983)
bowersock-1983The history of the country between the Negev and the Hawran from the fourth century BC to Constantine, and still the standard account of the Nabataean kingdom and of what Rome did with it in 106. Bowersock's case that the annexation was carried out without a war is the reason this site's Nabataean record does not code `conquest`.
17 citations · 4 chaptersEdward G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Volume II: From Firdawsi to Sa'di (T. Fisher Unwin, 1906)
browne-1906The continuation of Browne's survey, covering roughly 1000 to 1290. Its use here is source-critical rather than literary: Browne works through the later Persian anthologists — Dawlatshah above all — and shows, item by item, which of their celebrated stories were lifted without acknowledgement from earlier books, which anecdotes have been reassigned to more famous men than the ones they happened to, and which are simply invented. He is equally careful about Sultan Mahmud, whose reputation as a patron he treats as a thing the sultan bought and Firdawsi destroyed. Out of copyright.
17 citations · 13 chaptersGhaznavid Empire, Great Seljuk Empire, Kakuyid Dynasty, Khwarazmian Empire, Ma'munid Khwarazmshahs, Mongol Empire, Nizari Isma'ili State, Ziyarid Dynasty
F. David Bulbeck and Bagyo Prasetyo, Two millennia of socio-cultural development in Luwu, South Sulawesi, Indonesia, in Origins of Complex Society in South Sulawesi (OXIS) project (2007)
bulbeck-prasetyo-2007An archaeological and historical survey of Luwu built on the OXIS project's own site surveys, read alongside Ian Caldwell's textual work on the pre-Islamic Luwu king lists. Covers the iron trade that underwrote Luwu's own early power, its loss of the peninsula's central territories to Wajo and Bone around 1500, and the La Galigo literary tradition's own political uses. Open access.
17 citations · 5 chaptersDorin Matei, A History of the Romanians in 100 Memorable Episodes (Casa Radio Publishing House, 2018)
dorin-matei-2018A popular-format history overseen by a scientific council chaired by the president of the Romanian Academy, built around discrete episodes rather than a continuous narrative. Covers Wallachia's own proto-state rulers (Litovoi, Bărbat, Tihomir), Basarab I's break from Hungary and the 1330 Battle of Posada (including a direct corrective note that the battle's traditional name does not match the actual toponym), Mircea the Elder's reign and the Battle of Rovine, Moldavia's Dragoș legend, and Stephen the Great's 1475 victory at Podul Înalt (Vaslui) and 1497 victory at Codrii Cosminului. Open access, hosted by the Romanian public broadcaster Radio România Regional.
17 citations · 4 chaptersPaul Dresch, Tribes, Government, and History in Yemen (Clarendon Press, 1989)
dresch-1989Combines ethnography with history to describe the tribal system of the northern Yemeni highlands over roughly a thousand years, and the relation of the tribes to Islamic learning and to the Zaydi imamate. Cited here for why an office that had to be claimed rather than inherited lasted so much longer than the states around it.
17 citations · 5 chaptersWilliam Ellis, Polynesian Researches, During a Residence of Nearly Six Years in the South Sea Islands, Vol. I (Fisher, Son, & Jackson, 1829)
ellis-1829-v1A London Missionary Society missionary's account of Tahiti and the Society Islands, written from his own residence there and the records of colleagues who arrived with the mission ship Duff in 1797. Used here for Pomare I's established rule at the mission's 1797 arrival and his cession of Matavai; the 1802 "war of Rua," touched off by his own seizure of the idol Oro from Atehuru; his death on 3 September 1803 and his son Otu's assumption of the name Pomare, "which has ever since been the regal name in Tahiti," in 1804; the civil war and exile to Eimeo that followed; and the 12 November 1815 battle of Bunaauia, in which Pomare II's Christian party defeated the last pagan resistance on Tahiti. Out of copyright.
17 citations · 3 chaptersFerdinand Gregorovius (trans. Annie Hamilton), History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (George Bell & Sons, 1894)
gregorovius-1894A monumental, multi-volume narrative history covering the whole of this record's span. Volume III covers the ninth- and tenth-century Roman aristocracy under Theophylact, Theodora and Marozia, Alberic's coup and princely regime, his son's dual reign as Prince and Pope John XII, and Otto I's 962 coronation and Ottonianum; Volume IV covers the Investiture Controversy and Henry IV's 1077 penance at Canossa; Volume V (in two parts) covers Innocent III through the death of Frederick II in 1250 and Charles of Anjou's papally-sponsored 1266 conquest of Sicily at the Battle of Benevento; Volume VIII (in two parts) covers the sixteenth-century papacy from Cesare Borgia's fall through Julius II's territorial wars and the 1527 Sack of Rome to Clement VII's death in 1534. Public domain, open access via archive.org.
17 citations · 8 chaptersGregory of Tours, History of the Franks (Columbia University Press, 1916)
gregory-brehautA Gallo-Roman bishop writing in the 580s about events partly within living memory. He is a Catholic writing about Arians and a partisan of the Frankish house, and the bias is not concealed: Goths flee "as was their custom" and city walls fall down when Clovis looks at them. What he preserves of what people said and did is worth having anyway, and the partisanship is itself evidence about the period. Out of copyright.
17 citations · 8 chaptersIbn al-Qalanisi, The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades (Luzac, 1932)
ibn-al-qalanisiA Damascene administrator's year-by-year chronicle, contemporary with everything it describes down to 1160, and the closest thing to a newspaper record of the crusading century from the Syrian side. Gibb translates the portion covering the crusades and annotates the identifications. Out of copyright.
17 citations · 16 chaptersAmmarid Emirate of Tripoli, Principality of Antioch, Artuqid Dynasty, Burid Emirate of Damascus, County of Edessa, Mirdasid Emirate, County of Tripoli, Uqaylid Emirate, Zangid Dynasty
Ibn Khallikan, Ibn Khallikan's Biographical Dictionary (Wafayat al-A'yan) (Oriental Translation Fund, 1843)
ibn-khallikanSome eight hundred lives of notable men of the Islamic world, compiled in thirteenth-century Cairo and Damascus by a judge who names his authority for each anecdote and says when he does not believe it. Its value here is that it preserves the small things chronicles discard — what a prince paid for a couplet, what was written on the wall of an abandoned castle, what a man asked to have buried with him. De Slane's translation is out of copyright.
17 citations · 15 chaptersArtuqid Dynasty, Fatimid Caliphate, Hamdanid Dynasty, Marwanid Emirate, Mirdasid Emirate, Saffarid Dynasty, Tahirid Dynasty, Uqaylid Emirate
Sara Lowes, Nathan Nunn, James A. Robinson, Jonathan L. Weigel, The Evolution of Culture and Institutions: Evidence from the Kuba Kingdom, in NBER Working Paper No. 21798 (2015)
kuba-nber-2015An economics paper built on close, page-cited paraphrase of Vansina's own Kuba monographs (1964, 1978, 1990, 2010), used here as an accessible secondary route to material this corpus could not obtain directly - both of Vansina's own Kuba books are access-restricted on archive.org. Covers Shyaam's founding of the kingdom in the 1620s, its nine provinces and 120 kolm titles, its four courtly councils and judicial system, and its colonial and post-colonial history through the Congo Free State's rubber concessions, the 1910 indirect-rule decree, and the 1960-2 Kasai secession attempt. Freely downloadable from nber.org.
17 citations · 5 chaptersB. A. Litvinsky, Zhang Guang-da and R. Shabani Samghabadi (eds), History of Civilizations of Central Asia, Volume III: The Crossroads of Civilizations, A.D. 250 to 750 (UNESCO Publishing, 1996)
litvinsky-1996The reference volume for the five centuries between the Kushans and the Arabs in Central Asia, written by scholars from the countries the territory is now in and covering the material — Bactrian documents, coinage, seals, archaeology — that the Greek, Chinese and Persian narratives do not. Cited for the Hephthalites, who are named on this site's Sasanian record as the people who killed a king of kings and were not otherwise here.
17 citations · 5 chaptersBeatrice Forbes Manz, The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane (Cambridge University Press, 1989)
manz-198917 citations · 2 chaptersPaul E. Zimansky, Ancient Ararat: A Handbook of Urartian Studies, in Anatolian and Caucasian Studies (Caravan Books, 1998)
zimansky-1998The reference handbook: kings, chronology, sites, inscriptions and the state of the arguments. Cited here for the dynasty, the script and the ending, which is the part of the record where a handbook's willingness to say that nothing is known is worth more than a narrative.
17 citations · 2 chaptersEugène Casalis, The Basutos, or Twenty-Three Years in South Africa (James Nisbet and Co., 1861)
casalis-basutos-1861A firsthand memoir by the French Protestant missionary who lived at Moshoeshoe's own court at Thaba Bosiu from 1833, covering the Difaqane wars and cannibalism crisis that preceded his arrival, Moshoeshoe's own diplomatic suppression of both, the repulse of Mzilikazi's Ndebele army and Moshoeshoe's celebrated gift of cattle to the defeated force, the mission's own founding at Moshoeshoe's direct invitation, and the later, undated war against Boer emigrant encroachment and the failed "moral sovereignty" proclamation that followed it. The narrative ends with the author's own 1856 departure and does not reach Moshoeshoe's later reign, the 1868 British protectorate, or his 1870 death. Used here for the whole of the Basotho Kingdom's own record. Out of copyright.
16 citations · 4 chaptersPeter Avery, Gavin Hambly and Charles Melville (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 7: From Nadir Shah to the Islamic Republic (Cambridge University Press, 1991)
chi-7The last volume of the series, covering 1722 to 1979, and the spine of this region's extension past the Safavids. It carries the political narrative of the Afghan interlude, the Afsharids, the Zands and the Qajars, together with the parts this site's institutions fields need — land tenure, revenue administration, and the tribes.
16 citations · 3 chaptersPedro de Cieza de León, trans. Clements Markham, The Second Part of the Chronicle of Peru, in Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society (Hakluyt Society, 1883)
cieza-1883Cieza's own Señorío de los Incas, compiled in Cuzco around 1550 from the testimony of surviving Inca nobles (Orejones) a generation after the conquest - the fullest connected narrative of Inca dynastic history available: the Pacaritambo origin legend in several variant tellings, the Chanka war and Inca Yupanqui's rise as Pachacutec, the death of Huayna Capac and the disputed division of the empire, and the opening battles of the Huascar-Atahualpa civil war, breaking off as news arrives of the Spaniards' own landing. Public domain, open access via archive.org.
16 citations · 8 chaptersCharles Haliday, The Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin (1881)
haliday-1881A study of Norse Dublin drawing on both Irish annals and Scandinavian sources, covering the city's founding by Olaf the White in 852, the dynasty of Ivar, Sitric Silkenbeard's later reign (his 1028 pilgrimage to Rome and endowment of Christ Church), the kingship's passage after 1052 to a succession of outside Irish over-kings from Leinster and Munster, and its capture by Strongbow and the English in 1170, including King Hasculf's failed attempt to retake it. Open access via archive.org.
16 citations · 5 chaptersSigismund von Herberstein, Notes upon Russia: A Translation of the Earliest Account of that Country, entitled Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (Hakluyt Society, 1851)
herberstein-majorA Habsburg diplomat who went to Moscow in 1517 and again in 1526, spoke a Slavonic language, and wrote the book that told Europe what Russia was. His chapters on the Tatars are the fullest outside account of the Jochid successor states while they still existed: Kazan, Astrakhan, the Nogai and the Crimea, with dynastic detail he had from the Muscovite court and from Tatar princes living in Moscow. He is a Catholic imperial envoy who regarded the Muscovites as schismatics and the Tatars as a problem to be managed, and his information about places he never visited came from people with an interest in what he thought. Out of copyright.
16 citations · 6 chaptersKhanate of Astrakhan, Crimean Khanate, Khanate of Kazan, Nogai Horde
Ibn Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Batuta (Oriental Translation Committee, 1829)
ibn-battuta-leeThe earliest full English version, made from an abridgement rather than the complete Arabic text, so it is shorter and looser than the modern translations and its transliterations are eccentric. It is used here for the Anatolian chapters, where Ibn Battuta is describing what he walked through in about 1332 — a different sultan in every town, and the akhi brotherhoods that fed him in all of them. Out of copyright.
16 citations · 15 chaptersAydinid Beylik, Chagatai Khanate, Danishmendid Dynasty, Delhi Sultanate, Golden Horde, Karamanid Beylik, Kilwa Sultanate, Mali Empire, Marinid Sultanate, Midrarid Emirate of Sijilmasa, Emirate of Granada, Sultanate of Rum
C. E. Bosworth, SAMANIDS, in Encyclopaedia Iranica link
iranica-samanids16 citations · 3 chaptersEyal Regev, The Hasmoneans: Ideology, Archaeology, Identity, in Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplements 10 (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013)
regev-2013Reads the dynasty's self-presentation off its coins, its palaces at Jericho and its use of the Temple rather than off the books of Maccabees alone, and argues that the Hasmonean state was not a conventionally Hellenistic monarchy. This site's Hasmonean legitimation and succession fields are coded from it, because the question those fields ask — on what public ground was the right to rule asserted — is the question the book is about.
16 citations · 2 chaptersH. Ling Roth, Great Benin: Its Customs, Art and Horrors (F. King & Sons, 1903)
roth-benin-1903A compilation by a Halifax museum curator of every published and unpublished account of Benin he could assemble after the 1897 Punitive Expedition, from Ruy de Pina's chronicle of João Afonso de Aveiro's 1486 voyage through Captain Roupell's 1898 notes from Benin's own court historian and craftsmen, Duarte Pires's 1516 letter on the Portuguese mission, and Captain Boisragon's and Commander Bacon's own accounts of the 1897 massacre and expedition. Open access via archive.org.
16 citations · 5 chaptersFlora L. Shaw (Lady Lugard), A Tropical Dependency: An Outline of the Ancient History of the Western Soudan with an Account of the Modern Settlement of Northern Nigeria (James Nisbet & Co., 1905)
shaw-tropical-dependency-1905Written by a journalist who covered West Africa for The Times and later married the colonial administrator Frederick Lugard, drawing on Arabic chronicles translated by Houdas, Lugard's own reports as High Commissioner, and her own access to the officers who fought the 1903 campaign. Cited here for Usman dan Fodio's 1802-1804 jihad, Sultan Bello's founding of Sokoto and the battle of Dagh, and the 1903 British conquest of Kano and Sokoto. Open access via archive.org.
16 citations · 6 chaptersTiffiny A. Tung, Wari Empire, in The Oxford Companion to Archaeology, 2nd ed. (2012)
tung-2012A concise modern archaeological synthesis of Wari (Huari), c. AD 600-1000: its rise from the earlier Huarpa tradition, the distinctive orthogonal "patio-group" architecture used to trace its territorial reach, trophy-head taking of captive men and children, the provincial centers of Pikillaqta, Jincamocco, Viracochapampa and Cerro Baúl, the ambiguous status of Pachacamac and the north coast, and the ceramic-offering rites practiced at Conchopata and elsewhere. Author-hosted, open access.
16 citations · 6 chaptersFilip Van Tricht, The Latin Renovatio of Byzantium: The Empire of Constantinople (1204-1228), in The Medieval Mediterranean 90 (Brill, 2011)
van-tricht-2011Translated by Peter Longbottom. Argues against reading the Latin empire as a foreign occupation that never governed: Van Tricht's case is that its emperors presented themselves as legitimate Roman emperors and substantially continued Byzantine institutions, which is why this site's record for it codes `titulature` and why the Byzantine record now counts a successor claim it did not.
16 citations · 2 chaptersWilliam De Witt Alexander, A Brief History of the Hawaiian People (American Book Company, 1899)
alexander-hawaii-1899A continuous narrative history of Hawaii commissioned for use in the islands' own public schools, running from earliest settlement through the 1898 annexation to the United States. Used here for the 1810 peaceful cession of Kauai completing Kamehameha I's unification of the island chain; his death on 8 May 1819; the abolition of the kapu system and the old religion later that year under his son Liholiho (Kamehameha II); the end of the Kamehameha line with Kamehameha V's death intestate in 1872 and the elective monarchy that followed under Lunalilo and Kalakaua; the 1893 Committee of Safety's overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani and establishment of a Provisional Government; and the formal transfer of sovereignty to the United States on 12 August 1898. Out of copyright.
15 citations · 5 chaptersJohn Barrow, A Voyage to Cochinchina, in the Years 1792 and 1793 (T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1806)
barrow-cochinchina-1806An account by a member of the Macartney embassy's supporting squadron, which called at Cochinchina en route to China, including a "Historical Sketch of Modern Cochinchina" compiled from a French officer's manuscript memoir and corroborated, Barrow states, by missionary accounts and Chinese court testimony. Cited here for the 1774 Tay Son rising, the division of the kingdom among the three brothers, the Qing invasion of Tonquin and its aftermath, Nguyen Anh's exile at Pulo Wai and in Siam, Bishop Pigneau de Behaine's ("Adran's") 1787 treaty of Versailles, and the naval campaigns of 1790-96.
15 citations · 5 chaptersJames Henry Breasted, A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905)
breasted-1905The narrative companion to Breasted's Ancient Records, written by the man who had just finished translating the whole corpus of Egyptian historical inscriptions, and still the fullest continuous account built directly from them: almost every paragraph carries a reference to a document in the Records. Its absolute chronology is a century too high in places and is not used here — dates on this site follow shaw-2000 — and its Victorian judgements about national vigour and decadence are of their period. What it is used for is what the documents say, which is where its author was unmatched. Out of copyright.
15 citations · 9 chaptersEgypt, First Intermediate Period, Egypt, New Kingdom, Egypt, Old Kingdom, Hittite Empire
Heribert Busse, Iran under the Buyids, in The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 4 (Cambridge University Press, 1975)
busse-197515 citations · 3 chaptersGeorge L. Cowgill, State and Society at Teotihuacan, Mexico, in Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 26 (1997)
cowgill-1997A modern archaeological synthesis - Teotihuacan left no deciphered king-list or political chronicle, so this is the closest thing to a political history the site allows. Covers the city's rapid growth from 100 BCE, the roughly 200 CE mass sacrifice at the dedication of the Feathered Serpent Pyramid, evidence that the pyramid was later burned and left exposed - read as a reaction against powerful rulers and a shift toward more collective governance - and the selective, deliberate burning of the city's civic-religious core sometime in the 600s or 700s that ended its existence as a regional capital. Open access.
15 citations · 5 chaptersCharles J. Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History (Indiana University Press, 1985)
halperin-198515 citations · 5 chaptersJohn Foster Kirk, History of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, Volume I (Lippincott, 1864)
kirk-charlesbold-v1-1864A nineteenth-century narrative history covering the Valois dukes of Burgundy from the early fifteenth century through Charles the Bold's own accession, drawing on Commynes, Chastellain, and the Burgundian and French chronicle tradition. Used here for the 10 September 1419 assassination of John the Fearless at the bridge of Montereau and Philip the Good's resulting alliance with England; Philip's dominions, court and the founding of the Order of the Golden Fleece on his marriage to Isabella of Portugal, 10 January 1430; and Philip's death in June 1467 and Charles's accession. Out of copyright.
15 citations · 3 chaptersPlutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1859)
plutarch-cloughBiography rather than history, and Plutarch says so; his interest is character, and he selects for it. Two things make it useful here anyway. The last chapters of the Life of Alexander quote the court diary of the final illness almost day by day, and the Roman lives record what later generals did with Alexander's memory — which is a fact about the Romans and reliably reported. Out of copyright.
15 citations · 11 chaptersAntigonid Macedon, Media Atropatene, Attalid Kingdom, Macedonian Empire, Parthian Empire, Roman Republic
Janet Ross and Nelly Erichsen, The Story of Pisa (J.M. Dent & Co., 1909)
ross-1909A narrative history built on Ammirato's Istorie Florentine, Villani's chronicle, Guicciardini and Symonds, covering the Republic's decline after the 1284 Battle of Meloria, the Ugolino della Gherardesca episode and the Tower of Hunger, the Gambacorta lordship and the October 1406 surrender to Florence, and the 1494 revolt, the fifteen-year on-and-off siege that followed (including Leonardo da Vinci's 1503 attempt to divert the Arno), and the final capitulation of June 8, 1509. Public domain, open access via archive.org.
15 citations · 6 chaptersIsabel Toral-Niehoff, Al-Hira: Eine arabische Kulturmetropole im spätantiken Kontext, in Islamic History and Civilization 104 (Brill, 2014)
toral-niehoff-2014The monograph on the Nasrid capital, and the reason this site can code a religion carried on that record. Toral-Niehoff's subject is al-Hira as a city rather than the dynasty as a client: the churches and monasteries, the Church of the East hierarchy seated there, the poets, and the argument that the Arab urban culture assembled at al-Hira passed more or less directly into Kufa, its Islamic successor a few kilometres away.
15 citations · 2 chaptersW. A. R. Wood, A History of Siam, from the Earliest Times to the Year A.D. 1781 (T. Fisher Unwin, 1924)
wood-history-siam-1924A former British consul's general history of Siam, drawn from Siamese chronicles and inscriptions. Used here for the 1238 capture of Sukhothai from Cambodian rule by the allied chiefs Khun Bang Klang Tao and Khun Pha Mueang, and the former's coronation as King Sri Indraditya; the reign of his son Ram Khamhaeng, whose long conquests reached south to the Bay of Bengal and who introduced the Thai alphabet, adapted from Khmer script, in 1283; and the 1370 reduction of King Thammaraja II to a vassal of Ayutthaya, which the source itself dates as marking "the end of the independent Tai Kingdom of Sukhothai, after an existence of 132 years." Out of copyright.
15 citations · 3 chaptersNicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Cambridge University Press, 2002)
di-cosmo-200214 citations · 6 chaptersC. E. Bosworth and others, Ilek-Khans or Karakhanids, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition (Brill)
ei2-karakhanids14 citations · 2 chaptersAbraham Fornander, An Account of the Polynesian Race: Its Origin and Migrations, and the Ancient History of the Hawaiian People to the Times of Kamehameha I, Vol. II (Trübner & Co., 1880)
fornander-1880A Hawaii circuit judge's history, compiled from native chants, genealogies and oral tradition alongside the journals of Cook, King and other European voyagers, covering Hawaiian history from its mythic origins through Kamehameha I's own unification of the island chain. This second volume carries the narrative from Captain Cook's 1779 death at Kealakekua Bay - in which Fornander judges a young Kamehameha probably played some active part - through Kamehameha's own rise: the battle of Mokuohai in 1782, the killing of his last rival Keoua at the dedication of the Puukohola war temple around 1791, and the 1795 battle of Nuuanu, which the author treats as "the closing scene in the ancient history of the Hawaiian Islands." The narrative stops there and does not reach Kauai's later peaceful submission or Kamehameha's own death in 1819. A separate volume of comparative Polynesian vocabulary was also published as "Vol. III" of the same overall title; it is a linguistic reference work, not further narrative, and is not used here. Used here for the whole of the Kingdom of Hawaii's own record. Out of copyright.
14 citations · 4 chaptersWilliam Heywood, A History of Pisa: Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Cambridge University Press, 1921)
heywood-1921A scholarly history of Pisa's rise, covering the 1004 Saracen raid up the Arno, the 1015-1016 expulsion of Mogahid from Sardinia, the first documented consuls (1094), the 1113-1115 Balearic expedition against the Saracens of Majorca, the 1119 outbreak of the long naval war with Genoa, and the constitutional development of the Commune from private merchant association to consular government. Public domain, open access via archive.org.
14 citations · 3 chaptersC. E. Bosworth, GHURIDS, in Encyclopaedia Iranica link
iranica-ghurids14 citations · 3 chaptersC. E. Bosworth, KWARAZMSHAHS, in Encyclopaedia Iranica link
iranica-khwarazmshahs14 citations · 3 chaptersLeo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa (Hakluyt Society, 1896)
leo-africanus-poryA Granada-born Moroccan diplomat, captured by corsairs and presented to Pope Leo X, who wrote his account of Africa in Italian in the 1520s from journeys made a decade or so earlier. Pory's 1600 English is the version given here. Leo is excellent on what he saw — prices, buildings, court protocol, what the caravans carried — and unreliable where he is repeating what he was told, which includes most of what he says about the religion of places he did not enter; his Bornu chapter describes as heathen a kingdom that had been Muslim for four centuries. Out of copyright.
14 citations · 12 chaptersAghlabid Emirate, Hafsid Sultanate, Kanem-Bornu, Mali Empire, Marinid Sultanate, Midrarid Emirate of Sijilmasa, Rustamid Imamate, Songhai Empire, Wattasid Dynasty, Zayyanid Kingdom of Tlemcen
Mark Edward Lewis, China's Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty (Harvard University Press, 2009)
lewis-200914 citations · 4 chaptersHarold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia, updated edn (University of California Press, 2002)
marcus-2002A one-volume survey to the present, used here for the four centuries tamrat-1972 does not reach — Gondar, the Zemene Mesafint, Tewodros, Menelik and Adwa, and the ending. Marcus is brisk about the nineteenth century's imperial expansion in a way older Ethiopian historiography was not, which matters for a record whose peak reign doubled the state at the expense of its neighbours.
14 citations · 3 chaptersErik J. Marsh et al., The center cannot hold: A Bayesian chronology for the collapse of Tiwanaku, in PLOS ONE, vol. 18, no. 11 (2023)
marsh-2023A generational-scale radiocarbon chronology built from 102 dates, newly documenting a wave of ritualized violent deaths at Tiwanaku beginning around AD 910 and a rapid, roughly twenty-year urban collapse centred on AD 1010-1050 - concluding that the collapse predates the onset of reduced rainfall and was therefore not drought-induced, contrary to some other recent scholarship. Open access, CC-BY.
14 citations · 5 chaptersS. I. G. Mudenge, A Political History of Munhumutapa, c. 1400-1902 (Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1988)
mudenge-1988A political history of the Mutapa state from its Shona oral traditions of origin through to the final, failed 1897-1902 revival led by Chioko Dambamupute, drawing on Portuguese archival documents alongside oral tradition. Cited here for Mutota's and Matope's founding-era conquests, the 1561 mission and martyrdom of Fr Goncalo da Silveira at the court of Negomo, the fragmentation of the vassal state into petty chieftaincies including Chidima, the Portuguese military destruction and formal annexation of Chidima in 1884-85, and Chioko's 1897-1902 anti-Portuguese revival movement and death, which the source itself identifies as the end of both the historic Mutapa state's dream and its reality.
14 citations · 4 chaptersJames Murdoch, A History of Japan, Volume I: From the Origins to the Arrival of the Portuguese in 1542 A.D. (Asiatic Society of Japan, 1910)
murdoch-1910A detailed scholarly history of pre-1542 Japan, used for episodes Griffis's shorter narrative only gestures at or omits entirely - Prince Shōtoku's regency and the Seventeen Articles, the founding of Nara and the compilation of the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, Fujiwara no Michinaga's regency, and the Jōkyū War, the 1232 legal code, and the Ōnin War for the Kamakura and Ashikaga records. Out of copyright.
14 citations · 7 chaptersThe Ashikaga Shogunate, The Kamakura Shogunate, Yamato (Imperial Japan)
Donald M. Nicol, The Despotate of Epiros 1267-1479: A Contribution to the History of Greece in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1984)
nicol-1984The continuation of Nicol's own 1957 volume (which covers 1204-1267 and could not be obtained openly). Its introduction corrects a standing error in the scholarship it continues - that Michael I never actually held or used the title "Despot," and that "Despotate of Epiros" is a later, anachronistic label for what began as an unauthorized separatist province - and its own chapters trace Epirus's long, fragmented later history (Nicaean suzerainty, the Serbian occupation, the Orsini and Tocco families) down to the Ottoman conquest of its last cities between 1430 and 1479. Open access via archive.org.
14 citations · 4 chaptersCharles Oman, The History of England from the Accession of Richard II to the Death of Richard III (1377-1485), in The Political History of England, vol. IV (1906)
oman-1906Covers Richard II's deposition (1399), Agincourt (1415), the loss of Gascony at Castillon (1453) and the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses, through Richard III's death at Bosworth Field (1485). Open access via archive.org.
14 citations · 4 chaptersPeter Richardson, Herod: King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans, in Studies on Personalities of the New Testament (University of South Carolina Press, 1996)
richardson-1996The standard biography, built from Josephus read against the archaeology of the building programme and the coinage. Cited here for the institutions of the Herodian kingdom, and for the argument the title makes: that the two halves of Herod's position were a single arrangement rather than a contradiction he managed.
14 citations · 3 chaptersNajeeb M. Saleeby, Studies in Moro History, Law, and Religion (Bureau of Public Printing, Manila (Ethnological Survey Publications, Vol. IV, Part I), 1905)
saleeby-moro-1905A colonial-era study of Moro history drawn from the tarsila (genealogical chronicles) of Magindanao alongside Spanish colonial records. Used here for the arrival of Sharif Kabungsuwan and the conversion of Magindanao to Islam, dated to about 1475 by the author's own reasoning from genealogical generation-counts and Captain Thomas Forest's 1776 estimate; Datu Bwisan's 1597 defeat of a Spanish force under Marquis Rodriguez at Tampakan; the reign of Sultan Kudarat ("Corralat" in Spanish sources), his fort's defeat by General Corcuera in 1636, his 1646 treaty with Spain, and the renewed war of 1659 in which he blocked the Pulangi river against a Spanish advance; and Sultan Kudarat II's 1837 treaty submitting to Spanish sovereignty, which the source itself calls the beginning of the sultanate's downfall. Out of copyright.
14 citations · 4 chaptersR. W. Seton-Watson, The Southern Slav Question and the Habsburg Monarchy (Constable & Co., 1911)
seton-watson-1911A British historian and Habsburg-empire critic's political study of the Croat, Serb and Slovene lands, opening with a survey chapter, "Croatia from the Earliest Times till 1848." Cited here for the Croat migration and settlement under Byzantine suzerainty, Duke Tomislav's assumption of the royal title (attested at a 914 church council), King Zvonimir's 1076 coronation by a papal legate, and the extinction of the native dynasty and Coloman of Hungary's 1102 recognition as king.
14 citations · 3 chaptersR. O. Winstedt, History of Kedah (Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, No. 81, 1920)
winstedt-kedah-1920A critical scholarly reconstruction of Kedah's dynastic history, weighing the Hikayat Marong Mahawangsa (the "Kedah Annals") against Arab, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch and Achinese sources. Used here for the 1474 conversion of the first Muslim ruler, Sultan Muzaffar Shah, dated by an Achinese account and corroborated by the Sejarah Melayu; the 1611 Portuguese destruction of Kedah "with fire and sword"; the 1619 capture of Sultan Sulaiman Shah by Aceh's Sultan Iskandar Muda; the Dutch East India Company's on-and-off blockade of the Kedah river from the 1640s to the 1680s over tin; and the 1821 Siamese invasion, in which Sultan Ahmad Tajuddin Halim Shah fled and Siamese occupation reduced Kedah's population from 180,000 to 6,000 within six years, followed by the sultan's 1843 restoration under Siamese protection and the 1909 transfer of suzerainty over Kedah to Great Britain. Out of copyright.
14 citations · 4 chaptersMichal Biran, Qaidu and the Rise of the Independent Mongol State in Central Asia (Curzon Press, 1997)
biran-199713 citations · 4 chaptersG. W. Bowersock, The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam, in Emblems of Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2013)
bowersock-2013Reconstructs the sixth-century war between Jewish Arabia and Christian Ethiopia from two inscriptions on a monument that no longer exists, known only because a sixth-century traveller copied them. Cited for the Himyar record, and for the Aksumite invasion of 525 that ends it.
13 citations · 5 chaptersEmil Bretschneider, Mediaeval Researches from Eastern Asiatic Sources, volume I (Trubner, 1888)
bretschneider-1888A Russian legation physician in Peking who translated the Chinese sources on Inner Asia in full and annotated them against the Persian and Arabic ones. Cited here for his complete rendering of the Liao shi's account of Yelu Dashi, which is the Qara Khitai founding as the dynasty's own successor state told it. Bretschneider is a translator rather than an interpreter and says so; his identifications of tribal names are nineteenth-century guesses and are flagged as such in his notes. Out of copyright.
13 citations · 11 chaptersTayeb El-Hibri, The Abbasid Caliphate: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2021)
el-hibri-2021Used for the Abbasid arc after Harun al-Rashid, in particular the fourth fitna and the Samarra period.
13 citations · 4 chaptersC. E. Bosworth, TAHERIDS, in Encyclopaedia Iranica link
iranica-taherids13 citations · 3 chaptersPenetration of Dutch Colonial Power Against the Sultanate of Jambi, 1615-1904, in Journal of Maritime and Sociology of Nusantara Islands, Universitas Diponegoro
jambi-penetration-2021Spans nearly the whole of Jambi's own sultanate history, from Sultan Abdul Kahar's 1615 accession as its first Sultan and the earliest Dutch trading contact through the aristocratic factionalism the Dutch exploited across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to Sultan Thaha Syaifuddin's 1904 death resisting Dutch control. Open access.
13 citations · 5 chaptersGuy Le Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia, from the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur (Cambridge University Press, 1905)
lestrange-1905A province-by-province topography of the Islamic east built out of the Arabic and Persian geographers — Ibn Khurdadbih, Ibn Hawkal, Istakhri, Muqaddasi, Yaqut, Mustawfi and the Fars Namah — quoted and dated individually. Its use here is for what happened to old places after the polities that built them stopped: it records what a tenth-century traveller found at a Sasanian fire sanctuary, how large a former capital still was when a given geographer saw it, and what later inhabitants believed the ruins in front of them had been. Out of copyright.
13 citations · 13 chaptersMedia Atropatene, Bagratid Armenia, Caucasian Albania, Kingdom of Iberia, Characene, Emirate of Derbend, Elymais, Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, Hephthalite Confederation, Kingdom of Persis, Saffarid Dynasty, Seleucid Empire, Shirvanshahs
Stuart Munro-Hay, Aksum: An African Civilisation of Late Antiquity (Edinburgh University Press, 1991)
munro-hay-199113 citations · 3 chaptersNzinga Mbandi, Queen of Ndongo and Matamba, in UNESCO Series on Women in African History (UNESCO Publishing, 2014)
njinga-unesco-2014An illustrated biography and teaching unit built on Cavazzi's own seventeenth-century account and modern scholarship (Miller, Heintze, Thornton). Covers Ndongo's Portuguese contact from 1560, the 1575 conquest and founding of Luanda, the reigns of Ngola Kiluanje kia Ndambi through Ngola Mbandi, Nzinga's own 1622 embassy, baptism and 1624 accession, her 1626-1629 loss of Ndongo and retreat to Matamba, and her 1663 death. CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO, open access.
13 citations · 5 chaptersAntonio Pigafetta, Magellan's Voyage Around the World (Arthur H. Clark Co., 1906)
pigafetta-1906James Alexander Robertson's edition and English translation of Pigafetta's own Italian journal of the Magellan expedition (from the Ambrosian manuscript), the sole eyewitness account of the fleet's 1521 stay at Cebu - the blood compact and baptism of Raja Humabon, and the battle of Mactan in which Magellan was killed by the forces of the chief Lapulapu (rendered Cilapulapu).
13 citations · 4 chaptersInnocent Pikirayi, The Zimbabwe Culture: Origins and Decline of Southern Zambezian States, in African Archaeology Series (AltaMira Press, 2001)
pikirayi-2001A synthesis of the whole Zimbabwe culture — Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe, Khami, Mutapa — by a Zimbabwean archaeologist, and the reason this site can carry a record for a polity that left no writing of any kind. Every field on that page comes from stonework, imported ceramics, radiocarbon and faunal remains, which is why so many of them are empty.
13 citations · 5 chaptersVenetia Porter, The History and Monuments of the Tahirid Dynasty of the Yemen 858-923/1454-1517, in PhD thesis, University of Durham (1992)
porter-1992The only sustained study of the last independent Yemeni dynasty before the Ottomans, and it works from the buildings as much as the chronicles — the mosques and madrasas the Tahirids put up across the southern highlands are better evidence of where their authority actually reached than any account of their campaigns.
13 citations · 2 chaptersGeorge Burton Adams, The History of England from the Norman Conquest to the Death of John (1066-1216), in The Political History of England, vol. II (1905)
adams-1905Covers the Conquest and the Harrying of the North, Domesday Book, the Anarchy of Stephen's reign and its settlement by the Treaty of Winchester, Henry II's reign and the murder of Becket, and John's reign through Magna Carta and the First Barons' War. Open access, Project Gutenberg #8556.
12 citations · 5 chaptersEdward G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Volume III: The Tartar Dominion (1265-1502) (Cambridge University Press, 1920)
browne-1920The third volume of Browne's survey, covering the period between the Mongols and the Safavids — the one for which the Persian biographical tradition is richest and least reliable. He is cited here for three things the chronicles handle badly: the Sarbadar revolt, where he prints the founder's own reported words and Lane-Poole's count of twelve chiefs and nine violent deaths; the loss of Ibn-i Yamin's divan at Zawa and what that makes unknowable; and the invitations Hafez received and declined, with the verses he sent instead. Browne says throughout which of his anecdotes rest on late authorities and which do not. Out of copyright.
12 citations · 12 chaptersAk Koyunlu, Jalayirid Sultanate, Kara Koyunlu, Muzaffarid Dynasty, Sarbadars, Timurid Empire
Christian Jahoda, On the Foundation of the Nyarma gtsug lag khang, Ladakh, in Collected volume on Buddhist art and history of western Himalaya, Austrian Academy of Sciences (2019)
jahoda-2019-nyarmaA close philological study of the temple-founding narratives associated with the translator Rinchen Zangpo (958-1055) in Ngari and Ladakh during the "second transmission" of Buddhism - used here for his dates and the temple-building context of Guge's Buddhist revival. Open access.
12 citations · 2 chaptersAhmad ibn Fadlan and others, Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North (Penguin Classics, 2012)
lunde-stone-ibnfadlan-2012An anthology of medieval Arabic travel accounts of the northern steppes and forests, built around Ibn Fadlan's own report (the Risala) of the embassy the Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir sent to Almish ibn Shilki Yiltawar, king of the Volga Bulghars, arriving in May 922. Used here for the reading of the caliph's letter, the khutba controversy and the king's adoption of the name Ja'far in 922; for Ibn Hawqal's account of the Rus destruction of Bulghar and the Khazar capital Khazaran in 969; for the editors' own comparison of Ibn Fadlan's 922 description of Bulghar as a seasonal yurt-market against Abu Hamid al-Andalusi's 1130 description of it as a walled city and the leading fur market in the world, levying tribute on peoples to the north; and for the editors' chronology's dating of the Mongol conquest of the Volga Bulghars to 1237. A modern copyrighted translation and scholarly anthology, not a public-domain text, but the standard complete English edition of Ibn Fadlan's account.
12 citations · 3 chaptersAhmed ibn Mohammed al-Makkari, The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain (Oriental Translation Fund, 1843)
maqqari-gayangosA seventeenth-century Maghribi compilation that preserves long verbatim extracts from Andalusi historians whose own works are lost, which is what makes it usable: Gayangos translates the quotations and names the authority for each. Cited here for the destruction of Cordoba and Madinat al-Zahra in the civil war after 1009, where the eyewitness testimony comes through Ibn al-Raqiq. Out of copyright.
12 citations · 12 chaptersTaifa of Seville, Almoravid Empire, Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba, Idrisid Dynasty, Emirate of Granada, Zayyanid Kingdom of Tlemcen
Alfred Rambaud, History of Russia, from the Earliest Times to 1880 (C. F. Jewett Publishing Co., 1880)
rambaud-russia-1880A French historian's narrative survey, translated and enlarged for this American edition, drawing on the Russian chronicles and contemporary Polish and Hungarian accounts. Cited here, in chapter VII, "After the Fall of Kief," for Roman Mstislavich's conquest of Galitch, his son Daniel's turbulent minority, the Mongol invasion, and Daniel's 1254 coronation as King by a papal legate.
12 citations · 2 chaptersR. W. Seton-Watson, Histoire des Roumains (Librairie Félix Alcan, 1937)
seton-watson-1937-roumainsA French translation of Seton-Watson's "A History of the Roumanians: From Roman Times to the Completion of Unity" (Cambridge, 1934); the English original was not found accessible on archive.org, but this translation is open and unrestricted. Cited here for Ban Vladislav I "Vlaicu" of Wallachia's 1365 alliance with Louis the Great of Hungary during Louis's capture of Vidin, and his receipt of the Făgăraș march; for Alexandru cel Bun of Moldavia's stable 1401-31 reign, his marriage alliance and military cooperation with Poland (including Moldavian troops at Tannenberg in 1410); and for the Phanariote period (1711/1714- 1821) in both principalities - Dimitrie Cantemir's 1711 secret alliance with Peter the Great, his defeat and exile after Stănilești, Constantin Brâncoveanu's 1714 deposition, torture and execution in Constantinople with his sons, and the statistical picture of Phanariote rule (forty-one changes of throne in Wallachia and thirty-six in Moldavia across the period, thirty- three individual princes from twelve families, an average reign of roughly two and a half years).
12 citations · 6 chaptersAbdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770-1873, in Eastern African Studies (James Currey and Ohio University Press, 1987)
sheriff-1987An economic history of the Zanzibar empire from the East African side rather than the Arabian one, and the standard account of the two transformations it turned on: slaves used to grow cloves for export instead of being the export, and an ivory frontier pushed to the Great Lakes. It is cited here so that the Omani empire's economy is described by somebody writing about the people it was imposed on.
12 citations · 3 chaptersRein Taagepera, Size and Duration of Empires: Systematics of Size, in Social Science Research 7(2), 108-127 (1978)
taagepera-1978b12 citationsAkkadian Empire, Egypt, New Kingdom, Egypt, Old Kingdom, Hittite Empire, Middle Assyrian Kingdom, Middle Elamite Kingdom, Mitanni, Neo-Assyrian Empire, Neo-Babylonian Empire, Urartu
A. A. Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, 324-1453, Volume II (University of Wisconsin Press, 1928)
vasiliev-1928A detailed narrative, drawing on Byzantine, Bulgarian and Western chronicle sources (Acropolites, the letters of John Apocaucus and Demetrius Chomatenus, the Trnovo inscription of John Asen II), of Michael I Komnenos Doukas's founding of Epirus, Theodore's 1217 capture of the Latin emperor Peter of Courtenay, the 1222 conquest of Thessalonica, Theodore's 1224 imperial coronation and rivalry with Nicaea, and his catastrophic 1230 defeat and blinding at Klokotnitsa. Public domain, open access via archive.org.
12 citations · 3 chaptersJohn E. Woods, The Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, Empire, revised and expanded edn (University of Utah Press, 1999)
woods-1999The monograph on the White Sheep, and the book that made the fifteenth century in this region an argument rather than an interval. Woods reads the confederation through its own genealogical ideology — the descent from Bayandur Khan, the Oghuz past invoked as a right to rule — and through the three-stage movement his subtitle names, which is how this page's legitimation field came to be coded.
12 citations · 6 chaptersTranslated by C. C. Brown, Sejarah Melayu, or Malay Annals, in Oxford in Asia Historical Reprints (Oxford University Press, 1970)
brown-1970The Malay Annals in translation — the court chronicle of Melaka, composed after the sultanate had fallen and the dynasty was in exile at Johor. It is the principal internal source for that record and, like the Timbuktu chronicles on this site's Songhai page, it is elegy written by the survivors of the thing it describes.
11 citations · 5 chaptersFrances Ellen Colenso, History of the Zulu War and Its Origin (Chapman and Hall, 1880)
colenso-zulu-war-1880Written within a year of the war's end by the daughter of the Bishop of Natal, from official despatches, published inquiries and interviews with participants, sympathetic throughout to the Zulu case against the colonial authorities who provoked the invasion. Used here for the 1856 civil war between Cetshwayo and his brother Mbulazi over the succession under their father Mpande; Mpande's long nominal reign afterward and his natural death in 1872; Cetshwayo's 1873 coronation and the British "friendly expedition" that used it to assert suzerainty; the 11 January 1879 ultimatum and invasion; the 22 January disaster at Isandhlwana; the 4 July battle and burning of Ulundi; and Cetshwayo's capture on 28 August 1879 and exile to Cape Town. Not used for Dingane's 1828-1840 reign or the first sixteen years of Mpande's (1840-1856): this source's own background chapter opens its narrative in 1856, and no source consulted here covers the intervening period, including the war with the Voortrekkers and the Battle of Blood River. Out of copyright.
11 citations · 3 chaptersBenjamin R. Foster, The Age of Agade: Inventing Empire in Ancient Mesopotamia (Routledge, 2016)
foster-2016The first book-length study of the Akkadian period, drawing together forty years of work by a Yale Assyriologist and covering statecraft, army, cities, economy and daily life — which is what this site's fields ask for and what a general history of the ancient Near East cannot give at the necessary depth. Its last chapter is on how the empire has been presented by modern historians since the decipherment, including the Soviet literature summarised in English for the first time.
11 citations · 6 chaptersHans Hagerdal, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Lombok and Bali in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (White Lotus, 2001)
hagerdal-2001Balinese and Sasak material read against the Dutch company's records, on the period when Bali's kingdoms projected power across the strait to Lombok. This site's Gelgel record uses it for the seventeenth century and Coedes and Ricklefs for what comes before.
11 citations · 3 chaptersN. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins (eds), Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History, in Fontes Historiae Africanae, Series Arabica IV (Cambridge University Press, 1981)
levtzion-hopkins-1981Translations of what Arabic writers from the ninth to the fifteenth century said about West Africa, with the apparatus for judging it. It is the reason this site's Ghana record can be written at all: every field on that page comes from men who mostly had not been there, and a sourcebook that prints them side by side is the only way to see how much of the account is one author copying another.
11 citations · 5 chaptersHorace K. Mann, The Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, Volume I: The Popes Under the Lombard Rule (590-795) (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1902)
mann-1902Covers, in close and heavily footnoted detail, the Lombard king Liutprand's 728 restitution of Sutri to the papacy - which the author's own footnote calls a moment "some see" as the actual beginning of the temporal power - Pope Zachary's 751 ruling that sanctioned Pepin's deposition of the last Merovingian king, and Pope Stephen II's own diplomacy with Pepin and the Lombard king Aistulf that produced the 754 Quierzy promise and the 756 Donation of Pepin proper. Public domain, open access via archive.org.
11 citations · 3 chaptersThomas S. Asbridge, The Creation of the Principality of Antioch, 1098-1130 (Boydell Press, 2000)
asbridge-2000How the principality was actually assembled in its first three decades — its frontiers, its lordships, its relations with the Armenian and Greek population it governed — as against the narrative of the First Crusade that usually stands in for it. Cited here for the formation chapters and for the argument that Antioch was a going concern before Jerusalem was.
10 citations · 2 chaptersEmma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robertson (editors), The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume III, 1569-1576 (Arthur H. Clark Co., 1903)
blair-robertson-vol3A compilation of translated Spanish colonial-era documents and eyewitness relations. Cited here for the 1570 expedition of Martin de Goiti to Manila Bay - the blood compact with the Tagalog chiefs Raxa Soliman and his uncle, its breakdown, and the burning of Soliman's town - and for the formal 1570 act of taking possession of Luzon in the name of Spain.
10 citations · 2 chaptersC. E. Bosworth, The Later Ghaznavids: Splendour and Decay. The Dynasty in Afghanistan and Northern India, 1040-1186 (Edinburgh University Press, 1977)
bosworth-197710 citations · 2 chaptersBernal Díaz del Castillo, trans. John Ingram Lockhart, The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1844)
diaz-lockhart-1844An eyewitness conquistador's own account, written decades after the events by a soldier who marched with Cortés, covering the November 1519 first meeting between Cortés and Moctezuma II, Moctezuma's death from wounds during the June 1520 uprising, the "Noche Triste" retreat, the ninety-three-day siege of Tenochtitlan, and the capture of Cuauhtémoc on August 13, 1521. Public domain, open access via archive.org (two volumes).
10 citations · 4 chaptersFred M. Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton University Press, 1981)
donner-1981The standard study of the Rashidun conquests, and the reason the Rashidun chapters here are about tribal mobilisation and garrison towns rather than battles.
10 citations · 3 chaptersEinhard, Life of Charlemagne (Harper and Brothers, 1880)
einhard-turnerA courtier's biography of an emperor he had served for over twenty years, written in the 820s on the frame of Suetonius and borrowing Suetonius's sentences outright in places. It is the source of nearly every familiar image of Charlemagne and it is a defence of the dynasty by a man with a position in it, which shows most in the opening pages on the kings the family displaced. Out of copyright.
10 citations · 5 chaptersMelvin L. Fowler, The Cahokia Atlas: A Historical Atlas of Cahokia Archaeology (Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, 1989)
fowler-cahokia-atlas-1989A leading Cahokia excavator's atlas of the site, dating its features from 95 radiocarbon assays. Used here for the archaeological periodization of the American Bottom region, including the Mississippian period of A.D. 1000-1400 during which Cahokia reached "the full florescence of the complex society" that produced its mounds; the finding, from solid-core drilling of Monks Mound, that it was built in roughly 14 stages between about A.D. 900 and 1150, each stage averaging about 18 years, requiring a labor force the author estimates at about 10,000 people; the "Woodhenge" circles of large wooden posts excavated by Warren Wittry and interpreted as calendrical structures; the palisade wall enclosing roughly 83 hectares around the site's central plaza; the finding that a plurality of radiocarbon assays from the site cluster in the century between A.D. 1050 and 1150, marking that century as the site's occupational peak; and the author's own population estimate of "more than 10,000" residents at Cahokia's height, against competing estimates ranging as high as 30,000. A modern copyrighted work, not a public-domain text, but the standard archaeological atlas of a site with no surviving textual record of its own.
10 citations · 3 chaptersHenry H. Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part II: The So-Called Tartars of Russia and Central Asia, Division I (Longmans, Green, 1880)
howorth-1880-div1The Golden Horde from Jochi to its dissolution, assembled in English out of the Russian chronicles, the Persian historians Rashid al-Din and Wassaf, the Arabic sources on Mamluk Egypt, and the coinage. Howorth is a compiler and says so; what he provides is a continuous narrative of a state whose own records did not survive, with the disagreements between his authorities left visible on the page. Out of copyright.
10 citations · 5 chaptersWilferd Madelung, The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate (Cambridge University Press, 1997)
madelung-1997Used for the succession disputes and the first fitna. Madelung argues a minority position on the legitimacy question; the chapters follow him on sequence and chronology, not on that argument.
10 citations · 2 chaptersGeorge McCall Theal, History and Ethnography of Africa South of the Zambesi, from the Settlement of the Portuguese at Sofala in September 1505 to the Conquest of the Cape Colony by the British in September 1795, in Volume I: The Portuguese in South Africa, 1505-1700 (1907)
theal-zambesi-1907A narrative synthesis by the Cape Colony's own official historiographer, built from the Portuguese archival documents he had earlier collected and published in his nine-volume Records of South-Eastern Africa. Covers the Sofala gold trade, the Makalanga and the monomotapa institution, and the documented history of the Mutapa state from first Portuguese contact in 1505 through the civil war between Kapranzine and Manuza, the 1629 treaty making a monomotapa a Portuguese vassal, and the 1652 baptism and 1670 murder of the monomotapa Domingos. Open access via archive.org.
10 citations · 3 chaptersÉric Vallet, L'Arabie marchande: État et commerce sous les sultans rasulides du Yémen (626-858/1229-1454) (Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010)
vallet-2010The study of the Rasulid state as a commercial one, worked from the dynasty's own administrative and fiscal archives — material that only came to light recently and that almost no medieval Islamic polity has left. It is why this site can code a Yemeni dynasty's revenue basis from something better than inference.
10 citations · 4 chaptersJames Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Volume I: The First to the Seventeenth Dynasties (University of Chicago Press, 1906)
breasted-1906Every historical inscription then known from Egypt down to the Seventeenth Dynasty, translated and numbered in sequence, with the damaged passages marked and the conjectures flagged as conjectures. The translations have been revised many times since; the apparatus is what makes it usable here, because it shows on the page how much of any Old Kingdom text is actually standing. Out of copyright.
9 citations · 7 chaptersEgypt, Early Dynastic Period, Egypt, Middle Kingdom, Egypt, Old Kingdom
S. W. Bushell, The Early History of Tibet, from Chinese Sources (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, new series vol. XII, 1880)
bushell-1880A translation of the Tibetan chapters of the Tang histories, with the embassies, campaigns and treaty texts in full. It is the fullest continuous narrative of the empire in any language other than Tibetan and it is entirely a Chinese court's account of a rival: Tibetan victories appear as frontier disturbances, Tibetan envoys arrive to submit, and the chronology follows the reign years of the dynasty being attacked. Out of copyright.
9 citations · 7 chaptersEdward A. Freeman, A Short History of the Norman Conquest of England (Clarendon Press, 1880)
freeman-shorthistory-1880A condensed version of Freeman's own multi-volume history, written for students. Used here for the battle of Hastings (Senlac), 14 October 1066: the death of King Harold, shot through the eye and cut down by four knights who reached the English standard, and Duke William's refusal to allow Harold Christian burial at first, relenting only later. Out of copyright.
9 citations · 3 chaptersP. E. de Josselin de Jong, Minangkabau and Negeri Sembilan: Socio-Political Structure in Indonesia (Ijdo, 1951)
josselin-de-jong-1951A Leiden dissertation on the Minangkabau adat system and its export to Negeri Sembilan in the Malay peninsula, reprinted by AMS Press in 1980. It is a study of social and political structure — matrilineal descent, the paired offices of the Kings of the Three Seats, the relation between adat custom and royal authority — rather than a political chronicle, and is cited here for that structure rather than for a year-by-year account, which nothing consulted supplies for Pagaruyung before the eighteenth century.
9 citations · 4 chaptersGoddard Henry Orpen, Ireland under the Normans, in 4 vols (1911-1920)
orpen-1911The standard scholarly narrative of the Anglo-Norman conquest and lordship of Ireland, covering the invasion and settlement (vols 1-2, 1169-1216), the de Burgh family's conquest of Connaught and Ulster and the lordship's own territorial peak (vol 3, 1216-45), and Edward Bruce's invasion and death at Faughart in 1318 (vol 4, 1216-1333). Open access via archive.org.
9 citations · 3 chaptersPolybius, The Histories of Polybius (Macmillan, 1889)
polybius-shuckburghAn Achaean statesman deported to Italy after Pydna as one of the thousand hostages, who spent seventeen years in Rome, became a friend of the Scipios, and wrote to explain to Greeks how the Romans had conquered the world in fifty-three years. He is a participant, a detainee and an admirer at once, which is why his account of Roman diplomacy is so much colder than his account of Roman virtue. Out of copyright.
9 citations · 7 chaptersAntigonid Macedon, Attalid Kingdom, Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, Roman Republic, Seleucid Empire
Procopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars, Books I-II: The Persian War (Loeb Classical Library, 1914)
procopius-dewingThe secretary of Belisarius, writing in the 540s about a war he was present at, with a long digression on the Red Sea and the Arabian interior that is the only contemporary outside account of Roman dealings with Himyar and the tribes of central Arabia. He is well informed on what Constantinople decided and much less so on what happened at the far end of it, which is itself worth knowing. Out of copyright.
9 citations · 8 chaptersHephthalite Confederation, Himyar, Hujrid Dynasty, Jafnid Dynasty, Nasrids of al-Hira
J. J. Ras, Hikajat Bandjar: A Study in Malay Historiography, in Bibliotheca Indonesica 1 (Martinus Nijhoff, 1968)
ras-1968A critical edition and study of the Hikayat Banjar, the court chronicle of Banjarmasin, with the Malay text, an English translation and a long analysis of how the chronicle was assembled from older Javanese and Malay materials. It is the principal source for the sultanate's own account of its founding and is used here alongside Ras's own historical commentary on where the chronicle's chronology can and cannot be trusted.
9 citations · 3 chaptersT. F. Tout, The History of England from the Accession of Henry III to the Death of Edward III (1216-1377), in The Political History of England, vol. III (1905)
tout-1905Covers Edward I's conquest of north Wales (1282-84) and the Statute of Wales, Edward II's reign (the Gaveston favourites and his 1312 murder at Blacklow Hill, the rise of the Despensers, and the 1326-27 invasion, deposition and murder of Edward II by Isabella and Mortimer), and the opening decades of the Hundred Years' War under Edward III, including Crécy (1346), Neville's Cross (1346) and Poitiers (1356). Open access via archive.org and Project Gutenberg #16679.
9 citations · 3 chaptersGheorghe Cliveti, Union of the Romanian Principalities and the Collective Guarantee of the European Powers, in Annals of the Academy of Romanian Scientists, vol. 14 no. 1-2 (2022)
cliveti-2022Covers the diplomatic mechanics of the 1859 union of Wallachia and Moldavia - Alexandru Ioan Cuza's "double election" as prince of both principalities, the Ottoman Porte's grudging one-time recognition of it, and the European powers' own collective guarantee under the 1858 Paris Convention. Open access via aos.ro.
8 citations · 2 chaptersPietro Colletta, trans. Susan Horner, History of the Kingdom of Naples, 1734-1825 (1858)
colletta-1858A two-volume narrative opening with the 1734 Battle of Bitonto and Charles of Bourbon's restoration of an independent Kingdom of Naples after two centuries of Spanish and Austrian viceregal rule, and continuing through the Bourbon Restoration of 1815 to the 1st December 1816 decree formally merging the crowns of Naples and Sicily and renumbering Ferdinand IV as Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies. Public domain, open access via archive.org (two separately scanned volumes).
8 citations · 2 chaptersChristine Dobbin, Islamic Revivalism in a Changing Peasant Economy: Central Sumatra, 1784-1847 (Curzon Press, 1983)
dobbin-1983An economic and social history of the Minangkabau highlands across the Padri movement and war, built from Dutch and British trade records alongside local tradition. Cited here for the kingdom's last decades: the coffee and gold trade that funded the Padri reformists, the civil war between the Padris and the customary chiefs and royal house, and the Dutch intervention that ended both the war and the kingship.
8 citations · 2 chaptersHenry H. Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part III: The Mongols of Persia (Longmans, Green, 1888)
howorth-1888The Ilkhanate reign by reign, from Hülegü to the Jalayirids, worked up chiefly from d'Ohsson, from Quatremère's edition of Rashid al-Din, and from Wassaf. It is the fullest connected account of that state in English from before the modern scholarship, and it quotes its Persian authorities at length rather than paraphrasing them. Out of copyright.
8 citations · 6 chaptersPercy Horace Braund Kent, The Passing of the Manchus (Edward Arnold, 1912)
kent-1912A contemporary account of the 1911 revolution and the Qing abdication, published the same year, by a writer with direct access to Peking sources and reproducing the abdication edicts of 12 February 1912 in full. Out of copyright.
8 citations · 2 chaptersClements Markham, The Incas of Peru (Smith, Elder & Co., 1910)
markham-1910A general synthesis of Inca history and institutions by the Hakluyt Society's own principal translator of the Peruvian chronicles; cited here for its account of the quipu, the knotted cords kept by trained officials (quipucamayocs) that Inca administration used for numerical records and, with the aid of specialist interpreters, as reminders for historical and ceremonial knowledge; and, separately, for the Neo-Inca state at Vilcapampa (Vilcabamba) that Manco Inca founded after his own revolt against Pizarro failed - his death, his three sons' widely different responses to Spanish overtures (Sayri Tupac's negotiated exit, Titu Cusi's prolonged holdout and death in Spanish custody, and Tupac Amaru's forced accession and execution by Viceroy Toledo in 1571), and the end of the Inca royal line as a ruling dynasty. Open access via archive.org.
8 citations · 2 chaptersWilliam Miller, The Balkans: Roumania, Bulgaria, Servia, and Montenegro, in The Story of the Nations (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1896)
miller-1896An older English-language narrative history, useful here for two things a modern source did not give this corpus directly: the once-standard, now-superseded legendary founding account (Radu Negru in 1290 for Wallachia, kept alongside dorin-matei-2018's better- sourced Basarab/Tihomir reconstruction rather than in place of it), and a detailed narrative of Mircea the Elder's reign and Stephen the Great's wars, including the 1391 Ottoman tribute terms, the defeat at Valea Albă, and Stephen's own deathbed advice to submit to the Porte. Public domain, open access via archive.org.
8 citations · 4 chaptersAntonio de Morga, The Philippine Islands, Moluccas, Siam, Cambodia, Japan, and China, at the Close of the Sixteenth Century (Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas) (Hakluyt Society, 1868)
morga-stanley-1868Henry E. J. Stanley's English translation of Morga's 1609 chronicle, written by a Spanish colonial judge who served in Manila. Cited here for Legazpi's 1564-65 voyage and settlement of Cebu under the chief Tupas, and his 1571 founding of Spanish Manila on the site of the Tagalog town of the same name, across the river from Tondo.
8 citations · 2 chaptersSir Francis Palgrave, The History of Normandy and of England, Volume I (John W. Parker and Son, 1851)
palgrave-normandy-1851A nineteenth-century narrative history of Normandy's own founding, drawing on Dudo of Saint-Quentin (the duchy's earliest historian, writing from oral tradition since the Normans did not commit their own political dealings to writing in Rollo's own generation). Used here for the negotiations at Saint-Clair-sur- Epte in 911-912, by which King Charles the Simple ceded the lands around Rouen to the Viking leader Rollo in exchange for baptism and nominal homage - including Rollo's own refusal to kiss the king's foot, performed instead by a proxy who threw Charles backward in the act. Out of copyright.
8 citations · 1 chapterEmil Torday and T. A. Joyce, On the Trail of the Bushongo (Seeley, Service & Co., 1925)
torday-joyce-1925Torday's own account of his 1907-8 expedition to the Kuba court at Mushenge, built on native testimony gathered there - including the chronological anchor an elder unknowingly supplied him (a solar eclipse dated independently to 30 March 1680, falling in the reign of the 98th named chief, three reigns after Shamba Bolongongo), the orally preserved reign of Shamba Bolongongo (Shyaam) himself and his administrative and cultural reforms, the ndop portrait-statue tradition, and Torday's own acquisition of Shamba's own statue for the British Museum. Public domain, open access via archive.org.
8 citations · 5 chaptersMark Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium, 600-1025 (Macmillan, 1996)
whittow-19968 citations · 5 chaptersAnna Komnene, The Alexiad (Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1928)
alexiad-dawesThe emperor Alexios I's daughter writing about her father's reign, hostile to the Normans throughout and open about it. Its unique value for the crusader states is documentary: Anna transcribes the treaty of Devol of 1108 at length, apparently from the chancery text, so Bohemond's submission survives in the words he agreed to. Book XI covers the 1097 siege of Nicaea in close detail, including her father's secret deal with the Turkish garrison that surrendered the city to Byzantium rather than to the crusaders besieging it. Dawes' translation is out of copyright.
7 citations · 6 chaptersPrincipality of Antioch, Byzantine Empire, Danishmendid Dynasty, Kingdom of Sicily, Sultanate of Rum
Arrian, The Anabasis of Alexander (Hodder and Stoughton, 1884)
arrian-chinnockWritten some four hundred and fifty years after the events, by a Roman senator and provincial governor working principally from Ptolemy and Aristobulus, both of whom were on the campaign and neither of whose books survives. It is the soberest of the five surviving narratives and the only one that consistently says which of its lost sources a statement comes from. Chinnock's translation carries notes identifying where Diodorus, Curtius and Plutarch differ. Out of copyright.
7 citations · 6 chaptersSalil ibn Razik, History of the Imâms and Seyyids of 'Omân, from A.D. 661-1856 (Hakluyt Society, 1871)
badger-1871The Omani chronicle, in a translation with a long editorial introduction. Its provenance is part of its interest: the original manuscript was given to Badger at Muscat in 1860 by Sayyid Thuwayni, while Badger was sitting on the British commission that was about to divide Thuwayni's father's empire between him and his brother. Salil ibn Razik writes as an Ibadi partisan and calls the Portuguese polytheists; Badger annotates him as a Victorian churchman who thinks the sect fanatical. Read past both and it is the fullest continuous narrative any Arabian polity of this period left. Out of copyright.
7 citations · 7 chaptersAl Bu Sa'id Sultanate, Ibadi Imamate of Oman, Ya'ariba Imamate
Bar Hebraeus (Gregory Abu'l-Faraj), The Chronography of Gregory Abu'l Faraj, the Son of Aaron, the Hebrew Physician, Commonly Known as Bar Hebraeus (Oxford University Press, 1932)
bar-hebraeus-budgeA universal chronicle compiled in the 1280s by the Syriac Orthodox maphrian of the East, who wrote it in Syriac and then translated an Arabic version of it himself for Muslim readers. He worked from Arabic and Persian histories now partly lost as well as from Syriac ones, and his value here is that he is outside every party he describes: a Christian bishop under Mongol rule reporting on Turkish sultans, Arab caliphs and Byzantine emperors with no stake in which of them was legitimate. He preserves court ceremonial in physical detail — what was worn, how high a throne stood, who was permitted to bow — and his year-numbers, cross-dated between the Arab and Greek eras, are frequently inconsistent with each other and have to be reported as his rather than relied on. Out of copyright.
7 citations · 7 chaptersDanishmendid Dynasty, Great Seljuk Empire, Ilkhanate, Kakuyid Dynasty, Sultanate of Rum, Zangid Dynasty
J. Theodore Bent, Genoa: How the Republic Rose and Fell (C. Kegan Paul, 1881)
bent-1881A Victorian narrative history, and an openly partisan one: Bent finds the Genoese factions squalid, the Jacobins contemptible, and the republic's last three centuries a period he wishes could be struck from the record. Read past the verdicts and he is detailed and specific about the events of 1684 (Louis XIV's bombardment of Genoa and the doge's forced apology at Versailles), 1768 (the sale of Corsica to France after Pasquale Paoli's rebellion), 1796-97 and 1814-15, which are the years used here, and he prints what the participants said. Out of copyright.
7 citations · 4 chaptersJames Henry Breasted, A History of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912)
breasted-1912The narrative companion to Breasted's Ancient Records, quoting the documents at length in his own translations. Cited here for the Report of Wenamun, which he prints nearly in full. Out of copyright.
7 citations · 3 chaptersTrevor Bryce, Life and Society in the Hittite World (Oxford University Press, 2002)
bryce-2002The companion volume to bryce-2005, on how the state and the household worked rather than on what the kings did. This site's Hittite institutions are coded from it, for the same reason kemp-2018 rather than a campaign narrative supplies the Egyptian ones.
7 citations · 1 chapterUnknown (attributed to an officer in Caesar's army; translated by A. G. Way), Caesar: Alexandrian, African and Spanish Wars (William Heinemann Ltd / Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library), 1955)
caesar-african-war-loeb-1955The Loeb Classical Library edition and English translation of three anonymous continuations of Caesar's own commentaries, by officers who served under him rather than by Caesar himself. "The African War" covers Caesar's 47-46 BC campaign against the Pompeian remnant and King Juba I of Numidia in detail, from the landing at Hadrumetum through the battle of Thapsus (6 April 46 BC) to Juba's own death by a suicide pact with Petreius and the organization of Numidia into the Roman province of Africa Nova, governed initially by the historian Sallust. The translator's own introduction and chronology, used alongside the primary text, add the wider context of Cato's suicide at Utica and the kingdom's prior alignment against Caesar. Used here for Numidia's own end and annexation. Out of copyright.
7 citations · 2 chaptersCharles Campbell, History of the Colony and Ancient Dominion of Virginia (J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1860)
campbell-virginia-1860A nineteenth-century synthesis history, drawing on Beverley, Burk and the colony's own surviving records, by the same editor who prepared the 1855 edition of Beverley's history. Used here for the second Powhatan massacre of 18 April 1644; Opechancanough's capture by Sir William Berkeley while "nearly a hundred years old" and no longer able to walk; his death at Jamestown, shot by a guard about a fortnight after his capture; and the October 1646 treaty with his successor Necotowance, "styled King of the Indians," who agreed to hold his authority from the English crown, cede the land between the York and James rivers, and pay an annual tribute of twenty beaver skins - the settlement that ended the confederacy's own independence. Out of copyright.
7 citations · 2 chaptersFredegar and continuators, trans. J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar with its Continuations (Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1960)
fredegar-wallace-hadrillA seventh-century chronicle and its eighth-century continuations, covering the period Gregory of Tours's own history does not reach: Brunhild's capture and execution by Chlothar II in 613, Dagobert I's reign and 639 death at Saint-Denis, and the 687 Battle of Tertry in which Pepin of Herstal made himself master of the whole Frankish realm in all but royal title. Open access via archive.org.
7 citations · 3 chaptersHerbert A. Giles, The Civilization of China (Williams and Norgate, 1911)
giles-1911A short survey by the Cambridge professor of Chinese, written for a general reader and organised by theme rather than reign. Cited here for its translation of Sima Qian's own description of the First Emperor's tomb, given entire rather than summarised. Out of copyright.
7 citations · 4 chaptersGiraldus Cambrensis (Middle English trans., ed. Frederick J. Furnivall), The English Conquest of Ireland, A.D. 1166-1185, in Early English Text Society (1896)
giraldus-1896A Middle English translation of Giraldus Cambrensis's Expugnatio Hibernica, covering Diarmait Mac Murchada's exile and appeal to Henry II, Strongbow's intervention and marriage to Aoife, and the taking of Dublin and Waterford. Open access via archive.org.
7 citations · 2 chaptersMichael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa (Princeton University Press, 2018)
gomez-2018The major recent revision, built from Arabic manuscripts, oral tradition and archaeology together, and unusually direct about slavery, caste and gender in the Niger empires. Cited on this site's Mali and Songhai records where Gomez departs from the older narratives, and the departures are stated rather than smoothed over.
7 citations · 3 chaptersConstance Frederica Gordon Cumming, A Lady's Cruise in a French Man-of-War (William Blackwood and Sons, 1882)
gordon-cumming-1882A British travel writer's account of a Pacific voyage that included an extended stay in Tahiti under French rule, drawing on local newspapers and residents for the political history she recounts. Used here for the forced imposition of the French Protectorate on Queen Pomare IV in November 1843 - the "Reine Blanche" compelling the queen and chiefs to salute the Protectorate flag with gunpowder its own admiral supplied when they had none; Queen Pomare IV's death on 17 September 1877 after a reign of over fifty years, including thirty-five under the Protectorate; her son's accession as Pomare V; and Pomare V's cession of nominal sovereignty in June 1880 in exchange for a life pension, formally proclaimed as the annexation of Tahiti at Papeete in 1881. Out of copyright.
7 citations · 2 chaptersCharles Higham, The Civilization of Angkor (University of California Press, 2001)
higham-2001Angkor from the archaeology rather than from the temple inscriptions alone, by the excavator whose work on the pre-Angkorian Mekong is the reason the Khmer state is no longer explained as an import.
7 citations · 2 chaptersMuhammad al-Saghir al-Ifrani, Nozhet-elhâdi: histoire de la dynastie saadienne au Maroc, 1511-1670 (Ernest Leroux, Paris, 1889)
ifrani-houdasA Moroccan scholar's history of the Saadis, written at Marrakesh around 1720 under the dynasty that replaced them, in Houdas's French. It is the fullest Moroccan account of the sixteenth century and the only connected one for several stretches of it, and it is a court history twice over — al-Ifrani admires the Saadis and serves the Alawis, so the Wattasids are usurpers, the Alawis arrive as deliverance, and sultans are addressed in the vocabulary of lions and eagles. He is also a biographer of scholars and saints before he is a chronicler of campaigns, which is why the best material in him is what jurists said to sultans. Out of copyright.
7 citations · 4 chaptersRobert Irwin, The Middle East in the Middle Ages: The Early Mamluk Sultanate 1250-1382 (Croom Helm, 1986)
irwin-1986The political history of the Bahri period at the length the Cambridge volume's single chapter cannot give it. Cited for the factional mechanics — how a household actually took a sultanate, and why the Qalawunids are the exception that proves the sultanate had no succession rule.
7 citations · 4 chaptersT. L. Kington, History of Frederick the Second, Emperor of the Romans, in 2 vols (1862)
kington-1862A continuous narrative biography drawing on contemporary chronicles and the Emperor's own registers; volume 1 opens with Frederick Barbarossa's later reign (the 1176 defeat at Legnano and 1183 Peace of Constance) and covers Frederick II's Sicilian government, the 1231 Constitutions of Melfi, the 1228-29 crusade and self-coronation at Jerusalem under excommunication; volume 2 covers the 1245 deposition at the Council of Lyon and Frederick's 1250 death at Fiorentino. Open access via archive.org.
7 citations · 4 chaptersBeatrice Forbes Manz, Power, Politics and Religion in Timurid Iran, in Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization (Cambridge University Press, 2007)
manz-2007The successor volume to this site's Tamerlane source, on Shahrukh's Iran rather than Timur's conquests. Its question is the one the corpus keeps running into: how a government with no monopoly of force controlled a heterogeneous society, and why that arrangement was stable for decades at a time. Cited for the half of the Timurid century this site's page had compressed into a sentence.
7 citations · 4 chaptersRudi Matthee, Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan, in International Library of Iranian Studies (I.B. Tauris, 2012)
matthee-2012Argues against the moral-decline account of the seventeenth century — the weak shahs, the harem, the wine — and for a structural one: a small economic base, a tribal composition that had to be renegotiated continuously, and an environment that would not support the revenue the state needed. Cited because this site had disposed of a hundred years and the fall of a capital in one sentence.
7 citations · 2 chaptersMiskawayh and Abu Shuja al-Rudhrawari, The Eclipse of the 'Abbasid Caliphate: Original Chronicles of the Fourth Islamic Century (Basil Blackwell, 1921)
miskawayh-margoliouthTwo Baghdad chronicles of the tenth century in translation, written by men with government careers who knew how the administration worked and say so in a register no court panegyric uses: what a campaign cost, what a negotiation was really about, which official was afraid of whom. Cited here for the Qarmatians as Baghdad experienced them, for the Daylamite captains who became the Buyid dynasty, and — in Abu Shuja's continuation, written a century later from the papers of men who had been in the room — for the succession that followed Adud al-Dawla. Out of copyright.
7 citations · 6 chaptersAbbasid Caliphate, Buyid Confederation, Qarmatian State of Bahrayn, Ziyarid Dynasty
Yoshio Nishi and Yasuhiko Nagano, A General Review of the Zhangzhung Studies, in Senri Ethnological Reports, National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka (2009)
nishi-nagano-2009A survey of a century of Zhangzhung linguistic scholarship - the Dunhuang manuscripts, the Bon-tradition Tibetan-Zhangzhung dictionary, the language's classification and its connection to the dMu tribe and the Bon religion. Political history is not this paper's subject and is thin in it accordingly; what survives of Zhangzhung is mostly linguistic evidence, and this record follows that imbalance rather than inventing a political narrative the source does not supply. Open access.
7 citations · 3 chaptersCharles Oman, The Dark Ages, 476-918 (Rivington, Percival & Co., 1905)
oman-darkages-1905A general narrative history of early medieval Europe. Used here for the Avar Khaganate's raid on Friuli and Bavaria in 788, Charlemagne's own Danube campaign against the Avars two years later, the Lombard army's simultaneous storming of the Avar ring-camps in Pannonia, the continuation of the war under Pippin and Eric of Friuli after Charles was called away by a Saxon revolt, the capture of the great ring between the Danube and the Theiss and the Avaric trophies Charles sent as gifts to distant kings including Offa of Mercia, and the 805 submission of the Avar chiefs at Aachen, where Charles appointed one of them vassal Chagan under the baptismal name Abraham. Out of copyright.
7 citations · 1 chapterDavid W. Phillipson, Foundations of an African Civilisation: Aksum and the Northern Horn, 1000 BC - AD 1300 (James Currey, 2012)
phillipson-2012An archaeologist's account, running four centuries past the kingdom's end in order to argue for continuity into Christian Ethiopia rather than for a collapse. Cited here alongside munro-hay-1991 for the material evidence — the stelae, the settlement pattern, the Adulis trade — which is most of what this record has, since Aksum left inscriptions and coins and almost no administration.
7 citations · 4 chaptersF. M. Powicke, The Loss of Normandy (1189-1204) (University of Manchester Press, 1913)
powicke-lossofnormandy-1913An academic study of the collapse of Angevin rule in Normandy under King John, drawing on the English exchequer and charter rolls alongside the French chronicles of Rigord and William the Breton. Used here for the six-month siege of Chateau Gaillard, ending with Roger de Lacy's surrender on 6 March 1204, and the fall of Rouen - "urbs invicta," the unconquered city - to Philip Augustus on 24 June 1204, which the source states brought the war in Normandy to an end. Out of copyright.
7 citations · 1 chapterChris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000, in The Penguin History of Europe (Allen Lane, 2009)
wickham-2009Written against the idea of a dark age, and structural rather than narrative: what changed between the Roman world and the early medieval one was above all the disappearance of the land tax, and Wickham's account of what a state without taxation can and cannot do is why this site's Carolingian revenue field reads as it does.
7 citations · 1 chapterAppian of Alexandria, The Roman History of Appian of Alexandria, Volume II: The Foreign Wars (Macmillan, 1899)
appian-whiteA second-century Alexandrian who wrote Rome's history arranged by enemy rather than by year, so that each conquered people gets a continuous narrative from beginning to end. That structure makes him the best single source for the Mithridatic wars: he follows Pontus for forty-two years without cutting away. He is working from earlier accounts, mostly hostile ones, and preserves their figures without much scrutiny. Out of copyright.
6 citations · 6 chaptersPrince D. S. Mirsky, in J. R. Tanner, C. W. Previté-Orton and Z. N. Brooke (eds.), The Cambridge Medieval History, Volume VII: Decline of Empire and Papacy, in Chapter XXI, "Russia, 1015-1462" (Cambridge University Press, 1932)
cmh7-russia-1932A scholarly survey chapter covering Kievan Rus' and its successor principalities. Cited here for Galicia-Volhynia's post-1265 decline under Daniel's quarrelling successors, the Tatar khan Tulabugha's devastating invasion of the principality, the honest scholarly acknowledgment that the Volhynian Chronicle - the principal surviving source for the region's own history - stops after 1292, leaving "practically no sources" for the following half-century, and the principality's final incorporation into Poland in 1347, with its boyar aristocracy Latinizing while the common people of Lviv remained Orthodox and Russian.
6 citations · 2 chaptersR. K. Dikshit, The Candellas of Jejakabhukti (Abhinav Publications, 1977)
dikshit-1977A dedicated dynastic history of the Chandellas built directly from their own copper-plate and stone inscriptions and from contemporary Muslim chronicles. Cited here for Vidyadhara's reign and his two encounters with Mahmud of Ghazni, the Kalachuri king Lakshmikarna's near-destruction of the dynasty and Kirtivarman's restoration of it (an episode also recorded in the contemporary court drama Prabodhachandrodaya), Jayavarman's abdication to his uncle Prithvivarman, and Madanavarman's revival of Chandel power against the Kalachuri and Paramara kings. Openly accessible via archive.org.
6 citations · 3 chaptersEmir O. Filipović, The Most Noble and Royal House of Kotromanić: Constructing Dynastic Identity in Medieval Bosnia, in Südost-Forschungen, vol. 78 (2019)
filipovic-2019-kotromanicA University of Sarajevo historian's study of how the Kotromanić dynasty constructed and asserted its own legitimacy, drawing on Ragusan diplomatic archives. Cited here for Ban Stjepan II's restoration of Kotromanić rule after a roughly two-decade loss of the banate to the counts of Bribir, his territorial and economic expansion of the state, his genealogical connections to the Nemanjić, Árpád, Komnenos and Dandolo houses, and his daughter Elizabeth's 1353 marriage to King Louis the Great of Hungary; and for the 1403-04 crisis following King Ostoja's war with Ragusa - Duke Hrvoje Vukčić's central kingmaking role, Ragusa's own failed plot to install a client candidate, and the June 1404 noble assembly that installed Tvrtko I's son Tvrtko II instead.
6 citations · 3 chaptersJohn Faithfull Fleet, Inscriptions of the Early Gupta Kings and Their Successors (Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, volume III, 1888)
fleet-cii-iiiThe Gupta inscriptions with texts, translations and notes, including the Allahabad pillar prashasti of Samudragupta. The inscriptions are the dynasty's own account of itself in the most formal register available — court poetry cut in stone by a named officer of the king — and Fleet's translations preserve the lacunae rather than filling them, which is why the passages quoted here have gaps in them. Out of copyright.
6 citations · 3 chaptersPeter Garnsey and Richard Saller, The Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture, 2nd edn (University of California Press, 2014)
garnsey-saller-2014Not a narrative of emperors: a structural account of how the empire was paid for, governed, supplied and stratified, with chapters by Elsner, Goodman, Gordon and Woolf added to the second edition. This site's Roman institutions are coded from it, for the same reason kemp-2018 rather than a campaign history supplies the Egyptian ones.
6 citations · 3 chaptersPiero Garofalo, XX Settembre 1870: Rome's Capture as Contested Public Memory, in California Italian Studies (2024)
garofalo-2024A close narrative reconstruction, built on Italian-language memoirs, diplomatic correspondence and contemporary press accounts, of the September 1870 Capture of Rome - the diplomatic exchange between Pius IX and Vittorio Emanuele II, the five-hour battle at the Porta Pia breach, its casualty count, and the sixty-year "Roman Question" the capture opened, resolved only by the 1929 Lateran Treaty. Open access via escholarship.org.
6 citations · 2 chaptersSir Richard Burn (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume IV: The Mughul Period (Cambridge University Press, 1937)
haig-1937Cited for the 1601 siege of Asirgarh and the annexation of Khandesh, which falls after the scope of volume III. Out of copyright.
6 citations · 1 chapterJohn F. Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century: The Transformation of a Culture, revised edn (Cambridge University Press, 1997)
haldon-1997On the century in which the eastern Roman empire lost two-thirds of its revenue and rebuilt its army, its taxation and its administration around what was left. This site's Byzantine institutions are coded from it, because the state the fields describe is the one that came out of this century rather than the one that went into it.
6 citations · 2 chaptersIbn Khallikan, Biographical Dictionary (Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, 1842)
ibn-khallikan-slaneA thirteenth-century Kurdish judge in Cairo and Damascus compiled short lives of the eminent Muslims of the preceding six centuries — jurists, poets, generals, viziers — with dates, teachers, works and death notices, and de Slane translated the whole of it into English in four volumes. It is a reference book rather than a narrative, and its value here is that it reaches the Maghreb, where almost nothing else in English does: the qadis of Kairouan get entries with their dates and their books, and de Slane's footnotes carry long extracts from the lost local chronicles of Ifriqiya he was working from. Ibn Khallikan records what a learned man of his own school thought worth remembering, which is why soldiers appear mostly when they were also scholars. Out of copyright.
6 citations · 6 chaptersTaifa of Seville, Aghlabid Emirate, Almohad Caliphate, Almoravid Empire, Zirid Dynasty
C. E. Bosworth, SAFFARIDS, in Encyclopaedia Iranica link
iranica-saffarids6 citations · 1 chaptermultiple contributors, SALJUQS, in Encyclopaedia Iranica link
iranica-saljuqs6 citations · 1 chapterMinhaj al-Din Abu Umar-i Uthman al-Juzjani, Tabakat-i-Nasiri: A General History of the Muhammadan Dynasties of Asia (Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1881)
juzjani-ravertyA general history written at Delhi in the 1260s by a man from a family of scholars in the Ghurid highlands, dedicated to a grandson of Iltutmish and paid for with a village in the Punjab. That biography is also its bias: it is warm about the Ghurids and warmer about the Delhi sultans, and Raverty's notes are combative about the errors of earlier translators. Its value here is as a near-contemporary witness on two things the Persian and Arabic chronicles cover thinly — the purchase and manumission of Iltutmish, which Juzjani had from the court that descended from him, and the manoeuvring between the Khwarazmshah, the Qara Khitai and the last Karakhanid of Samarkand. Out of copyright.
6 citations · 4 chaptersJohn Foster Kirk, History of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, Volume III (Lippincott, 1864)
kirk-charlesbold-v3-1864The concluding volume of the same history. Used here for the battle of Nancy, 5 January 1477, in which Charles the Bold's army was destroyed by the combined forces of Rene of Lorraine and the Swiss, and for the recovery of Charles's own body two days later - stripped, frozen into a ditch, and mauled by wolves or dogs, identified by his physician, valet and laundress from old scars and his uncut nails. Out of copyright.
6 citations · 1 chapterDaniel David Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia, Volume II (University of Chicago Press, 1927)
luckenbill-1927The Assyrian royal inscriptions in translation, arranged by reign, with the formulaic passages given in full rather than summarised. Cited here for Ashurbanipal's account of the sack of Susa, which is one of the most detailed descriptions of a deliberate obliteration written by the person who ordered it. Out of copyright.
6 citations · 6 chaptersMiddle Elamite Kingdom, Neo-Assyrian Empire, Neo-Elamite Kingdom, Saba'
James Murdoch, with Isoh Yamagata, A History of Japan, Volume III: The Tokugawa Epoch, 1652-1868 (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1926)
murdoch-1926Volume III of Murdoch's history, covering the Tokugawa Shogunate from the mid-seventeenth century to its fall. Used here for the Genroku cultural and economic flowering, Yoshimune's Kyōhō Reforms, the Temmei famine of 1783-1787 with contemporary eyewitness testimony, and Ōshio Heihachirō's 1837 rising and Mizuno Tadakuni's Tenpō Reforms. Out of copyright.
6 citations · 4 chaptersBilge Qaghan and Yolig Tegin, The Orkhon Inscriptions (Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, vol. V, 1930)
orkhon-rossThe memorial stones raised in the Orkhon valley in 732 and 735 for Kul Tegin and Bilge Qaghan, in Ross's English of Thomsen's final Danish rendering. They are the oldest substantial texts in any Turkic language and the only place a steppe empire of this period speaks at length in its own voice — which is exactly what has to be watched: the text is a qaghan's address to his own people, justifying his house, blaming its subjects for its collapse and warning them off the Chinese, and every campaign in it is a victory. Thomsen's readings carry a good many bracketed queries and they are kept here. Out of copyright.
6 citations · 4 chaptersNikolaus Leo Overtoom, Reign of Arrows: The Rise of the Parthian Empire in the Hellenistic Middle East, in Oxford Studies in Early Empires (Oxford University Press, 2020)
overtoom-2020The first full study of early Parthian history since 1938, and the first to treat it as Hellenistic political history rather than as a prologue to the Roman wars. Cited because the Parthians are the least-served major polity in this corpus and the older literature reaches them almost entirely through Roman defeats.
6 citations · 3 chaptersMpu Prapanca, translated by Stuart Robson, Desawarnana (Nagarakrtagama), in KITLV Verhandelingen 169 (KITLV Press, 1995)
robson-1995The Majapahit court poem of 1365 in translation with commentary, by the superintendent of Buddhist affairs at the court he is describing. It is the principal internal source for that record and the reason its fourth chapter is about how to read a list.
6 citations · 1 chapterSuetonius (translated by Alexander Thomson, revised by T. Forester), The Lives of the Twelve Caesars: Caligula (Henry G. Bohn, 1855)
suetonius-thomson-forester-1855Suetonius's own biography of Caligula, written some eighty years after the emperor's death with access to imperial archives, here in the Bohn's Classical Library revision of Thomson's eighteenth-century translation. Cited for Caligula's execution of his cousin Ptolemy, king of Mauretania and grandson of Mark Antony and Cleopatra through his mother Cleopatra Selene, over nothing more than a fine purple robe that drew public attention at a games - the killing that ended Mauretania as a client kingdom and saw it annexed outright. Out of copyright.
6 citations · 1 chapterGeorge McCall Theal, History of South Africa since September 1795, Vol. I: The Cape Colony from 1795 to 1828, the Zulu Wars of Devastation and the Formation of New Bantu Communities (Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1908)
theal-1908-v1The standard old narrative history of colonial South Africa, drawing on contemporary journals, missionary accounts and testimony given decades later at the Bloemhof arbitration. Used here for Umsilikazi's (Moselekatse's) break from Tshaka's Zulu army after he withheld booty from his king, and his flight north across the highveld leaving, in the source's own words, "no human beings left" behind him. The source does not give the break a single explicit year; it is narrated under a marginal date of 1825, following an account of 1823 disturbances already reaching the Barolong from the same Zululand wars. Out of copyright.
6 citations · 1 chapterJames Henthorn Todd (ed. and trans.), Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh: The War of the Gaedhil with the Gaill, in Rolls Series (1867)
todd-1867A parallel Irish/English edition of the medieval Irish narrative of the wars against the Norse, culminating in the Battle of Clontarf (1014) - including the eyewitness-style account of Brian Boru's death in his tent at the hands of Brodir. Open access via archive.org.
6 citations · 2 chaptersCornelius Wessels, Early Jesuit Travellers in Central Asia, 1603-1721 (Martinus Nijhoff, 1924)
wessels-1924-jesuit-travellersA Jesuit historian's study of the earliest European missionary journeys into Central Asia and Tibet, built from the missionaries' own surviving letters. Chapters II and III cover António de Andrade's 1624 arrival at Tsaparang, the first European mission into Tibet, and its history through the kingdom of Guge's own 1630 collapse - the succession crisis and rejected second marriage that started an eighteen-year war with Ladakh, the king's alienation of his own brother the Chief-Lama over his favor toward the mission, and the siege, betrayal and capture of the king and his family that ended Guge's independent existence, drawn primarily from Andrade's own 4 February 1633 letter to the Jesuit General in Rome. Open access via archive.org.
6 citations · 2 chaptersSalina Zainol, Azharudin Mohamed Dali, and Mardiana Nordin, Pemerintahan Kerajaan Bone Abad Ke-14 Sehingga Abad Ke-19 (The Reign of Bone Kingdom, 14th to 19th Century), in SEJARAH: Journal of the Department of History, University of Malaya, No. 29 (2) (2020)
zainol-dali-nordin-2020Carries Bone's own governing institutions - the Dewan Hadat (Ade' Pitu) council of seven, the Tomarilalang chief minister's office, the punggawa war-command - from the founding tomanurung through the nineteenth century, closing with the kingdom's defeat in the Second Bone War of 1859-60 and its reduction to a Dutch leenvorstendom (loan-kingdom), losing Sinjai, Bulukumba and Bantaeng outright. Does not reach the 1905-06 Dutch military expedition that broke Bone's remaining autonomy, or the resistance that continued into the 1940s; a later source would be needed for that span. Open access.
6 citations · 1 chapterMichele Amari, trans. Lord Ellesmere, History of the War of the Sicilian Vespers (1850)
amari-1850An English translation of Amari's own 1842 study, covering Charles of Anjou's 1266 conquest of the Kingdom of Sicily at the Battle of Benevento and the death of Manfred, the misrule of his officials, and the 1282 Sicilian Vespers massacre and revolt itself in Palermo. Public domain, open access via archive.org.
5 citations · 2 chaptersZahir al-Din Muhammad Babur, The Babur-nama in English (Memoirs of Babur) (Luzac, 1922)
babur-beveridgeThe autobiography of the founder of the Mughal empire, written in Chaghatay Turkish and translated here from the Haydarabad codex rather than from the Persian version made for Akbar. It is the only substantial first-person memoir left by any ruler of the Islamic world before the modern period, and its value is that it records the unimpressive parts: the provinces lost, the winters without money, the walking barefoot in the hills. Beveridge's notes are exhaustive about where the manuscript has gaps, which matters, because several years of Babur's life are missing entirely. Out of copyright.
5 citations · 5 chaptersJonah Barrington, Historic Records and Secret Memoirs of the Legislative Union between Great Britain and Ireland (1844)
barrington-1844A contemporary account by an Irish MP who voted against the 1800 Act of Union, detailing the patronage and bribery - including the £1,500,000 distributed among members of both Houses - used to secure its passage. Open access via archive.org.
5 citations · 1 chapterA. B. Brewster, The Hill Tribes of Fiji (Seeley, Service & Co., 1922)
brewster-fiji-1922A colonial administrator's record of forty years' service among the interior tribes of Fiji, covering the period from just before cession to his own retirement. Used here for the 1874 Deed of Cession negotiated by Sir Hercules Robinson, Governor of New South Wales, placing Fiji under Queen Victoria's sovereignty after Thakombau and the leading chiefs signed it; Thakombau's subsequent voyage to Sydney aboard HMS Dido at Robinson's invitation; and the measles epidemic an attendant brought back from that voyage, which spread through the group and killed a large part of the population soon after cession. Out of copyright.
5 citations · 1 chapterRadu Cârciumaru, Vlad the Impaler, the Truth Behind the Myth: His Youth and Fight Against the Ottoman Empire, in Open Journal for Studies in History, vol. 6 no. 1 (2023)
carciumaru-2023A close, primary-source-cited reconstruction (Ottoman, Byzantine and Wallachian chronicles) of Vlad III's childhood as an Ottoman hostage at Eğrigöz, his father Vlad Dracul's 1447 execution, his own two brief reigns, the 1462 war and the night attack on Mehmed II's camp, and his brother Radu's Ottoman-backed usurpation of the throne. Creative Commons BY 4.0, open access via archive.org.
5 citations · 2 chaptersDonald Collier, Cultural Chronology and Change as Reflected in the Ceramics of the Virú Valley, Peru (Field Museum of Natural History (Fieldiana: Anthropology, Vol. 43), 1955)
collier-viru-1955A chronological synthesis of the north Peruvian coast built from the Viru Valley Project's stratigraphic and, by the time of writing, early radiocarbon evidence. Used here for Wendell Bennett's 1949 pre-radiocarbon estimate - cited by the author as the working chronology of the field at the time - placing the Gallinazo and Mochica cultural period at approximately A.D. 300-1000, and for the source's own framing of a "Late Epoch" beginning with "the collapse of Mochica culture" and continuing until the Spanish conquest. The only accessible source found for this record giving a dated chronological bracket for the Mochica period.
5 citations · 1 chapterZanzibar Protectorate (Colonial Office), Colonial Office Annual Report on Zanzibar, 1946 (His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1947)
colonial-report-zanzibar-1946The British Colonial Office's own annual administrative report on the Zanzibar Protectorate, opening with a dynastic history of the Al-Busaid sultans from Ahmad bin Said (Imam of Muscat, 1741) to "Seyyid Sir Khalifa bin Harub... the reigning Sultan" as of 1946. Used here to correct the record of what followed the 1896 bombardment: Seyyid Hamoud's installation and six-year reign, the 4 November 1890 proclamation of the formal British Protectorate, the brief reigns of Ali bin Hamoud and the abdication that followed his father's death, and Khalifa bin Harub's own accession on 9 December 1911 - a reign this report itself was still describing as current thirty-five years later. Not used for anything after 1946, the report's own year: Khalifa II reigned until 1960, and the Protectorate itself continued to independence in December 1963, the revolution of January 1964, and union with Tanganyika in April 1964 to form Tanzania - none of it covered by this report, which was written while the Protectorate was still, by its own account, an ordinary and apparently permanent fact of the colonial administrative order. Out of copyright.
5 citations · 1 chapterAnne-Marie Eddé, trans. Jane Marie Todd, Saladin (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011)
edde-2011The full-length modern biography, and the corrective this site needed for a page whose only Saladin source was a book about how Europe read him. Eddé works from the Arabic chancery and chronicle material on the parts the legend has no use for — the Egyptian fiscal reorganisation, the iqta' assignments, the twelve years spent fighting other Muslims — and is unsentimental about the propaganda apparatus Saladin's own secretaries ran.
5 citations · 1 chapterHerbert A. Giles, A History of Chinese Literature (D. Appleton and Company, 1901)
giles-1901A survey of Chinese letters by dynasty, written for English readers with no Chinese. Cited here for its account of the burning of the books and the tradition that melons grew in winter over the pit where the executed scholars were buried — Giles reports the tradition and is explicit that it is one. Out of copyright.
5 citations · 3 chaptersJohn Richard Green, A Short History of the English People (Harper & Brothers, 1875)
green-shorthistory-1875A popular nineteenth-century narrative history of England. Used here for Offa's wars against the Welsh of Powys, the building of Offa's Dyke from the Wye to the Dee, and the Mercian law code issued to govern relations between English and Welsh settlers along it; Offa's construction of an overlordship over Kent, East Anglia, Wessex and Northumbria through marriage alliances and a client king placed on the West Saxon throne; the standoff with Charlemagne over the Frankish court's harbouring of Offa's rivals, resolved by treaty rather than war; and the unravelling of Mercian supremacy after Offa's 796 death, including the revolt of Kent, the restoration of Ecgberht to Wessex with Frankish backing, and the civil war that followed Cenwulf's own death. Out of copyright.
5 citations · 2 chaptersHerodotus, The History of Herodotus (Macmillan, 1890)
herodotus-macaulayWritten about a century after Babylon became a Persian province, by a Greek who reports what he was told there. It is not a source for what the Neo-Babylonian empire was; it is the best surviving source for what people in the fifth century believed about it, which is a different and equally useful thing. Out of copyright.
5 citations · 5 chaptersAchaemenid Empire, Egypt, Middle Kingdom, Median Empire, Neo-Babylonian Empire
Ibn Isfandiyar, An Abridged Translation of the History of Tabaristan (Luzac, 1905)
ibn-isfandiyar-browneA local history of one province, written in Persian about 1216 by a man whose father had served the Bavand court and who had been at that court himself. It is the principal source for almost everything known about the dynasty, and it is not a neutral one — Browne's translation is abridged and says where it abridges. A later hand carried the chronicle on to 1349, which is why it also contains the close account of how the house ended: the murder in the bath at Amul, the sons who were sheltered by the ustandar of Rustamdar, and the last attempt to put them back. Out of copyright.
5 citations · 4 chaptersAnthony Jenkinson and others, Early Voyages and Travels to Russia and Persia (Hakluyt Society, 1886)
jenkinson-hakluyt-societyThe papers of the English merchants who opened the northern route to Russia and pushed on down the Volga to Bukhara and Persia. Jenkinson reached Astrakhan in 1558, the year after Moscow took it, and went on across the Nogai steppe in a famine year; he is a factor reporting to the Muscovy Company, so he records what things cost, how many days a stage took, and how many people were for sale. He is also describing a catastrophe from the deck of a boat and has no interest in its causes. Out of copyright.
5 citations · 4 chaptersKhanate of Astrakhan, Khanate of Kazan, Khanate of Khiva, Nogai Horde
Flavius Josephus, The Complete Works of Flavius Josephus (1895)
josephus-whistonA Jerusalem priest of Hasmonean descent who commanded in Galilee against Rome, surrendered, predicted Vespasian's accession, and spent the rest of his life in Rome writing the history of his own people for a Roman audience under Flavian patronage. Every one of those facts shows. He is the only continuous narrative source for the Hasmoneans and the Herods, and he is settling scores throughout. Whiston's eighteenth-century translation is the one that circulated. Out of copyright.
5 citations · 5 chaptersTibetan and Himalayan Library, University of Virginia, Sakya-Mongol Yuan State (Places, Kingdoms, Empires feature set), in kmaps.virginia.edu
kmaps-sakya-polityA scholarly reference entry on the administrative structure the Mongols imposed on Sakya-governed Tibet - the household census, the decimal hierarchy of units up to the myriarchy, and the province of three circuits Khubilai Khan decreed for a country too small to technically qualify as one. Used here for institutional and administrative detail; it names no individual rulers. Open access.
5 citations · 1 chapterCampbell Macknight, Mukhlis Paeni and Muhlis Hadrawi, The Bugis Chronicle of Bone (ANU Press, 2020)
macknight-paeni-hadrawi-2020The first complete English translation, with the original Bugis text, of Bone's own court chronicle - a reign-by-reign succession history from the founding tomanurung Matasilompo'é through the traumatic events of early 1667, treating each reign through accession, marriage, notable episodes and death. Reign lengths are given but absolute dates are not attempted by the chronicle itself; this corpus follows the editors' own cross-check against later genealogical king lists (Appendix 2) where a year is needed. Creative Commons licensed (BY-NC-ND), open access.
5 citations · 2 chaptersFergus Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World (31 BC - AD 337) (Duckworth, 1977)
millar-1977The book that reframed the emperor as a man who mostly answered letters. Millar's method is to ask what emperors demonstrably did rather than what the constitution said they were, and the answer — hearing embassies, judging cases, replying to cities — is why this site's Roman legitimation field carries `election` rather than something grander.
5 citations · 1 chapterPaul the Deacon, History of the Langobards (University of Pennsylvania, 1907)
paul-deacon-foulkeThe only narrative of the Lombard kingdom written by a Lombard, composed at Monte Cassino in the 780s by a man who had served the last king's daughter and then spent years at the court of the king who deposed her father. It breaks off at 744 and never reaches the end it was written after. Paul is two centuries from his early chapters and repeats saga where he has nothing better; Foulke's footnotes are relentless about saying so and are as useful as the text. Out of copyright.
5 citations · 5 chaptersMarco Polo, The Book of Ser Marco Polo (John Murray, 1903)
polo-yuleYule's third edition, revised by Henri Cordier. Polo's own text on Lesser Armenia and Turcomania is a page each and reads like a merchant's briefing note, which is what makes it useful: he says what was traded and who was paying tribute to whom. Yule's annotation is several times the length of the text and carries the nineteenth-century scholarship on the Cilician kingdom, including where its last king ended up. Out of copyright.
5 citations · 5 chaptersNicholas Postgate, Bronze Age Bureaucracy: Writing and the Practice of Government in Assyria (Cambridge University Press, 2013)
postgate-2013Ten Middle Assyrian government archives from Ashur and the provinces, many previously unedited, read for what the practice of writing did to the practice of governing. This site's Middle Assyrian institutions are coded from it; the Neo-Assyrian record three hundred years later is coded from frahm-2023, and the two together are the closest this corpus comes to watching one state's machinery across a long interruption.
5 citations · 1 chapterGiovanni R. Ruffini, Medieval Nubia: A Social and Economic History (Oxford University Press, 2012)
ruffini-2012Built from the Old Nubian documents excavated at Qasr Ibrim — land sales, accounts, letters, much of it still unpublished — and the reason this site's Makurian institutions can be coded at all. Ruffini's finding is a monetised economy with exchange rates connected to the wider world, in a kingdom whose external reputation rests entirely on archery and a treaty.
5 citations · 3 chaptersS. P. Scott, History of the Moorish Empire in Europe, Volume 1 (1904)
scott-1904An English-language narrative history of Muslim Spain and its Christian neighbors, covering, among much else, the 844 Viking landing on the Asturian coast and subsequent raid on Seville, and King Ordoño I of Asturias's 859 capture of Albelda alongside Pamplona's own forces. Open access via archive.org.
5 citations · 2 chaptersGeofani Milthree Saragih and Yoga Triwanda, Sistem Pemerintahan Kesultanan Siak Sri Indrapura, in Universitas Riau, Faculty of Law coursework paper (2021)
siak-sistem-pemerintahan-2021A student paper built partly on an interview with the historian Prof. Suwardi Mohammad Samin, cited here with that caveat for two claims not found elsewhere among the sources consulted: the sultanate's own governing council of four hereditary datuk (Tanah Datar, Limapuluh, Pesisir and Kampar), who chose each new sultan by consensus rather than by a fixed rule of succession, and Sultan Sjarif Kasim II's telegram to President Sukarno in 1945 pledging the new Republic his support and the whole of the sultanate's own treasury. Open access.
5 citations · 2 chaptersTheophylact Simocatta, The History of Theophylact Simocatta (Oxford University Press, 1986)
theophylact-simocatta-whitby-1986An early-seventh-century Byzantine history of the reign of Emperor Maurice (582-602), with the translators' own scholarly notes. Used here for the Avars' arrival on the Roman diplomatic horizon in 558 as refugees from the expanding Turkic federation of central Asia, their settlement in Pannonia after helping the Lombards crush the Gepids (driving the Lombards themselves into Italy), the fall of Sirmium to the Avars in 581 or 582 and the punitive treaty that followed, the episode of the Chagan's demand for an elephant and then a gold couch from Maurice, and the Avar sack of Singidunum, Augustae and Viminacium and siege of Anchialus in 583-584, including the Chagan's threat to destroy the Long Walls of Constantinople. A modern copyrighted translation, not a public-domain text, but the only complete English translation of this history.
5 citations · 2 chaptersJohn Thornton, The Emergence of Social and Political Complexity in West Central Africa, in Journal of African History, vol. 66 (2025)
thornton-2025-originsRevises the long-standard Cuvelier account of a single hero-king's invasion founding Kongo directly. Working from a reordered chronology of the kingdom's own recorded oral traditions, Thornton argues Kongo began as a small province, Mpemba Kasi, that built alliances (with Mbata, then Soyo) and ultimately conquered its own much larger parent state, Mpemba, placing the kingdom's own genealogical founding date around 1350 rather than treating Kongo as the regionally, ex nihilo first complex polity. Creative Commons BY 4.0, open access.
5 citations · 2 chaptersDiki Wahyudi, Peristiwa Sultan Adji Muhammad Idris Menentang VOC (Kesultanan Kutai Kartanegara), in Universitas Lambung Mangkurat, Banjarmasin (2021)
wahyudi-idris-voc-2021A short literature-review article on Sultan Adji Muhammad Idris, already dated on this page as Kutai's first ruler to hold the title Sultan in 1732. It is thin, occasionally internally inconsistent on genealogy, and not used here for any claim not corroborated by its own clearly dated material: the Dutch East India Company's four failed attempts to impose a trade monopoly on Kutai (1634, 1635, 1667 and 1747), and Kutai's alliance under Idris with La Maddukelleng, Arung Matowa of Wajo (1736-54), against VOC power in South Sulawesi. Open access.
5 citations · 1 chapterJulius Wellhausen, The Arab Kingdom and its Fall (University of Calcutta, 1927)
wellhausen-1927The 1902 Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz in English. It is the study that established the Umayyad period as a subject in its own right rather than as the prelude to the Abbasids, and it is unusually explicit about which Arabic authority each statement rests on and how far that authority can be pressed. A century of scholarship has revised it; its judgements about the sources are still worth reading, and it is cited here for the dynasty's fall and for what happened to its survivors.
5 citations · 5 chaptersChronicle of the Kings of Alba, in Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University (2023)
alba-chronicleAn open translation of the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba (the Scottish Chronicle in the Poppleton Manuscript), the only native narrative source for Scotland c.850-975, covering Kenneth mac Alpin's reign and accession to Dál Riata and Pictland. The editorial headnote itself flags the surrounding tradition as later embellishment. Open access.
4 citations · 1 chapterJuan Albarracín-Jordán, The Archaeology of Tiwanaku: The Myths, History, and Science of an Ancient Andean Civilization (1999)
albarracin-jordan-1999A synthesis by a Bolivian archaeologist who directed excavation in the Tiwanaku Valley for over a decade, covering the site's monumental core (Akapana, Kalasasaya, Pumapunku), its raised-field agricultural hinterland, the four competing scholarly models of Tiwanaku's own political organization (Urban Revolution, Altiplano, Centralized Bureaucracy and Local Autonomy), and the rival Aymara Invasion and Climate Degradation hypotheses for its collapse, weighed against continuity evidence in ceramics, settlement and burial practice. Open access via archive.org.
4 citations · 3 chaptersAmmianus Marcellinus, The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus (Bohn, 1902)
ammianus-yongeA Greek-speaking staff officer of the Roman army writing in Latin in the 380s, the last major historian of the empire before its western half went. His geographical digressions describe the provinces as an officer saw them — which cities were fortified, what the country produced, how it had been acquired — and are cited here for what the Nabataean kingdom had become two and a half centuries after it stopped existing. Out of copyright.
4 citations · 4 chaptersAppian of Alexandria, The Civil Wars (Macmillan, 1899)
appian-civilwars-whiteThe companion volume to this site's Foreign Wars citation, by the same translator, covering the Gracchi through Actium as a single continuous civil conflict rather than as separate crises - which is itself Appian's own argument about the period. Out of copyright.
4 citations · 2 chaptersAshoka, Inscriptions of Asoka (Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, volume I, 1925)
asoka-hultzschThe rock and pillar edicts, in the standard edition, with the Prakrit, Greek and Aramaic texts and translations. They are the oldest deciphered inscriptions in India and one of the very few places in the ancient world where a ruler speaks in the first person at length. What they are is a government's public statement of its own policy, cut where people would see it — so they record what Ashoka wanted said about Ashoka, and the absence of any independent check on it is the thing to hold on to. Out of copyright.
4 citations · 2 chaptersKathryn Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran, in Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs 35 (Harvard University Press, 2002)
babayan-2002On what the Safavid movement was before it was a state: Persianate Sufism and Alid messianism, and rulers whose followers expected the end of the world rather than a government. It is the source for the `divine-sanction` on this site's Safavid record, which had been coded off a general history that describes the outcome rather than the claim.
4 citations · 2 chaptersRichard Bagwell, Ireland under the Stuarts and during the Interregnum, in 3 vols (1909-1916)
bagwell-1909The direct sequel to Bagwell's Tudors volumes, covering the 1641 Rebellion, Cromwell's storming of Drogheda (1649) and the Cromwellian land settlement, the Restoration, and the Williamite War through the Battle of the Boyne (1690). Open access via archive.org and Project Gutenberg.
4 citations · 2 chaptersAhmad ibn Yahya al-Baladhuri, The Origins of the Islamic State (Kitab Futuh al-Buldan) (Columbia University, 1916)
baladhuri-futuhCompiled in the ninth century from earlier authorities, and organised as a province-by-province account of how each place came under Muslim rule and on what terms. Its interest is that it is not written as a story: it is written as a dossier, because the tax status of a district in the ninth century depended on what had been agreed in the seventh, and Baladhuri records the competing versions, the documents, and the objections to them. Hitti's translation of the first part is out of copyright and complete.
4 citations · 4 chaptersHeinrich Barth, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa: Being a Journal of an Expedition Undertaken under the Auspices of H.B.M.'s Government, in the Years 1849-1855 (Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1857)
barth-1857-vol2A German geographer traveling under British sponsorship, based for months at Kukawa and given access to at least two Bornu court chronicles (girgam) and a local scholar, Imam Ahmed, whom he cross-checked against Makrizi and Ibn Battuta's own independent notices. His own translated chronology - regnal start-years reckoned backward from a securely dated 1820s battle - is cited here for the fifteenth-century restoration under Ali Ghazi (Ali Dunamami), founder of the capital Ngazargamu, and for the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mais his own narrative summary compresses but still names and dates. Out of copyright.
4 citations · 2 chaptersCassius Dio (translated by Earnest Cary, on the basis of the version of Herbert Baldwin Foster), Dio's Roman History, Volume VI: Books 51-55 (William Heinemann Ltd / Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library), 1955)
cassius-dio-cary-1955The Loeb Classical Library edition of the books of Dio's Roman History covering Augustus's settlement of the east and west after Actium through his middle reign. Used here for Juba II's installation as king of his father's Numidian kingdom and his marriage to Cleopatra Selene shortly after 30 BC, his 25 BC transfer from Numidia to Mauretania - trading his "hereditary domain," largely absorbed into the Roman state, for Mauretania and the former territories of Bocchus and Bogud - and the Gaetulian revolt against his rule, put down by Cornelius Cossus (honoured afterward with the title Gaetulicus) in a campaign the translator's marginal dating places around AD 6. Out of copyright.
4 citations · 1 chapterRuy Gonzalez de Clavijo, Narrative of the Embassy to the Court of Timour at Samarcand (Hakluyt Society, 1859)
clavijo-markhamThe journal of a Castilian embassy sent to Timur in 1403, kept by one of the ambassadors, who had no particular literary ambition and therefore wrote down what he was told and what things cost. He is used here for Trebizond, where the party wintered and where he reports the court gossip of a small empire without appearing to realise how damaging it is, and for Samarkand in the autumn of 1404, where he is the only Western eyewitness of Timur's court and records the feasts, the executions and the building works with the same flat attentiveness. Markham's notes are Victorian and occasionally wrong. Out of copyright.
4 citations · 4 chaptersAydinid Beylik, Ottoman Empire, Timurid Empire, Empire of Trebizond
Patricia Crone and Martin Hinds, God's Caliph: Religious Authority in the First Centuries of Islam, in University of Cambridge Oriental Publications 37 (Cambridge University Press, 1986)
crone-hinds-1986Argues from early poetry, coinage and epigraphy that the Umayyads styled themselves khalifat Allah, deputy of God, and claimed a religious authority the later Sunni tradition reserved for the scholars. The thesis is contested and the Umayyad chapter drafted from it says so; it is cited because the legitimation coding on that page has to rest on what the dynasty claimed rather than on what its successors said it claimed.
4 citations · 2 chaptersJohn F. Healey, The Religion of the Nabataeans: A Conspectus, in Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 136 (Brill, 2001)
healey-2001Built from Nabataean Aramaic inscriptions, iconography and archaeology rather than from literary sources, which is what makes it usable for a coded field: it can say what the kings claimed because it is reading what they had carved. Cited here for the divinisation of Nabataean kings and for the script, Healey having also edited the Nabataean tomb inscriptions of Mada'in Salih.
4 citations · 1 chapterHenry H. Howorth, History of the Mongols, from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part I: The Mongols Proper and the Kalmuks (Longmans, Green, and Co., 1876)
howorth-1876-mongolsA nineteenth-century narrative history built from the Persian chroniclers (Rashid al-Din, Juvaini) via earlier European translations, alongside Chinese sources. Cited here for Ögödei's 1229 election after a two-year interregnum, his brother Tolui's shamanic self-sacrifice and death in 1232, the Jin dynasty's May 1234 collapse, and the 1235-36 founding and inauguration of Karakorum, including Yelü Chucai's advocacy for employing literate Chinese administrators in the conquered territory. Superseded on points of chronology and interpretation by modern scholarship (morgan-2007, already cited elsewhere on this page), but usable for events it narrates in direct, checkable detail from primary sources. Out of copyright.
4 citations · 2 chaptersmultiple contributors, ABBASID CALIPHATE, in Encyclopaedia Iranica link
iranica-abbasid-caliphate4 citations · 1 chapterTilman Nagel and others, AL-E BUYA, in Encyclopaedia Iranica link
iranica-al-e-buya4 citationsSiti Khairiah, Abdulhaleem Obaid A. Alyusufi, and Hezam Sultan Alkahtani, Islamic Religious Education in the Sultanate of Siak Sri Indrapura (1917-1945): A Social History, in Jurnal Indo-Islamika, Vol. 14 No. 1 (2024)
khairiah-siak-education-2024Covers the reign of Sultan Sjarif Kasim II (1908-1946), Siak's last ruler, through the schools he founded using the sultanate's own treasury - Madrasah Taufiq Alhasjimiah (1917) for men, Sulthanah Lathifah School (1927) and Madrassatoen Nisa' (1933) for women - after Dutch policy had stripped the sultan of most administrative autonomy and left him a traditional and religious figurehead. Open access.
4 citations · 1 chapterAli ibn al-Hasan al-Khazraji, The Pearl-Strings: A History of the Resuliyy Dynasty of Yemen (E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series, 1906)
khazraji-redhouseThe Rasulid dynasty's own chronicle, by a man who lived at the court of its seventh sultan alongside Firuzabadi, the chief judge of the kingdom and author of the great Arabic dictionary. It is a court history and reads like one — the sultan is divinely aided on every page — but it is also a dated register of a working state: revenue circuits, appointments, the court's seasonal move between Ta'izz and Zabid, famines and revolts, often day by day. It stops in 1400, sixty years before the dynasty fell, because the author died in 1409. Translated from what was then a unique manuscript by a British lexicographer who says in his preface that his interest was Aden's bygone fortunes as the empire's coaling station. Out of copyright.
4 citations · 4 chaptersSilvia Hunold Lara, Depois da batalha de Pungo Andongo (1671): o destino atlântico dos príncipes do Ndongo, in Revista de História (São Paulo), no. 175 (2016)
lara-2016-pungo-andongoCovers the December 1671 siege of Pungo Andongo by Portuguese forces under Luís Lopes de Sequeira, the capture and beheading of King Dom João Hari (Ngola Hari), and the subsequent Atlantic deportation of roughly sixteen surviving princes of Ndongo's royal line - first to Brazil, then to Lisbon by 1673, where Portuguese authorities dispersed them among convents rather than risk their return to Angola or contact with the Palmares maroon community. Open access via scielo.br.
4 citations · 1 chapterW. E. H. Lecky, Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland: Swift, Flood, Grattan, O'Connell (1871)
lecky-1871Essay-form treatment covering Jonathan Swift's Irish pamphleteering, including the 1699 Woollen Act's effect on Irish trade, Molyneux's banned tract on legislative independence, and the 1724 Drapier's Letters campaign that defeated Wood's halfpence patent, as well as Henry Grattan and the 1782 declaration of Irish legislative independence, including Grattan's own speech to the Irish Parliament that day. Open access via archive.org.
4 citations · 2 chaptersGuy Le Strange, Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate, from contemporary Arabic and Persian sources (Clarendon Press, 1900)
lestrange-1900A topographical reconstruction rather than a narrative history: Le Strange works from Ya'qubi, Ibn Serapion, Khatib al-Baghdadi, Yaqut, Ibn Jubayr and the Persian historians of the Mongol conquest to establish where in Baghdad each gate, canal, market and palace actually stood. Cited here for the plan of al-Mansur's Round City, for the measurements the Arabic authorities give and disagree about, and for the siege of 1258 and what became of the city afterwards. Out of copyright.
4 citations · 4 chaptersWilliam E. Lingelbach, Austria-Hungary (1910)
lingelbach-austria-hungary-1910Volume XVII of "The History of Nations" series (Henry Cabot Lodge, editor-in-chief), based on the work of Paul Louis Léger of the Collège de France, first published 1907 and reissued 1910. Picks up where coxe-austria-1847 stops: chapter XXIII, "Francis II and the Wars against the Revolution, 1792-1804," covers the loss of the Austrian Netherlands, the partitions of Poland, and wartime finance and administration; chapter XXIV opens with Francis II's own 1804 proclamation assuming the hereditary title Emperor of Austria in response to Napoleon's coronation. Open access via archive.org.
4 citations · 2 chaptersDaniel David Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia, Volume I (University of Chicago Press, 1926)
luckenbill-1926The companion volume, running from the earliest Assyrian rulers to Sargon II, and the fullest English gathering of the Middle Assyrian royal inscriptions there is. Its editorial matter is as useful as the translations: Luckenbill states which king he thinks a text belongs to, what the rival attributions are, and where he is guessing — the note on the Broken Obelisk sets out three incompatible readings and settles on none of them with confidence. Out of copyright.
4 citations · 4 chaptersal-Masudi, El-Mas'udi's Historical Encyclopaedia, entitled 'Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems', Volume I (Oriental Translation Fund, 1841)
masudi-sprengerThe first volume of the same work translated into English, and the only one Sprenger completed. It carries the geographical books, including the account of the Caspian, the Caucasus and Bab al-Abwab as they stood in the 930s and 940s — who held which mountain kingdom, which of them paid the Shirvanshah and which did not, and the arrival of the Rus fleet in a sea no fleet had ever entered. Sprenger annotates heavily and disagrees with his author in the notes, sometimes rightly. Out of copyright.
4 citations · 3 chaptersMegasthenes, Ancient India as Described by Megasthenes and Arrian (Thacker, Spink, 1877)
megasthenes-mccrindleThe surviving fragments of the account written by Seleucus Nicator's envoy to Chandragupta Maurya, collected out of the later Greek and Latin authors who quoted him. He is the only outsider who saw the Mauryan capital, and his measurements of it have been partly confirmed by excavation. He is also at three removes from the reader: nothing of his own text survives, so every sentence is somebody else's paraphrase, and the quoting authors preserved the marvels — the gold-digging ants, the men without mouths — as readily as the administration. Out of copyright.
4 citations · 2 chaptersCharles L. Norris-Newman, Matabeleland and How We Got It: With Notes on the Occupation of Mashunaland, and an Account of the 1893 Campaign by the British South Africa Company (T. Fisher Unwin, 1895)
norris-newman-1895A war correspondent's own account of the 1893 campaign, written from the British South Africa Company side and drawing on his own presence in Matabeleland through the war. Used here for the Victoria Incident of July 1893 that triggered the war, the Company columns' advance, Lobengula's destruction of his own kraal at Bulawayo and flight north on November 3-4, 1893, and his death as a fugitive on or about January 22-23, 1894 - reported to the author by the trader Dawson, who had been following the King's party. Written for a British readership sympathetic to the Company; read against that bias. Out of copyright.
4 citations · 1 chapterH. St. John Philby, Arabia of the Wahhabis (Constable, 1928)
philby-1928The diaries of a British political officer attached to Ibn Sa'ud in 1918, published a decade later once the outcome was known. Philby had by then become a partisan of the man he was reporting on and an opponent of the Hashemite policy his own government had adopted, so his judgements of the sharifs should be read as advocacy. What he records verbatim — a conversation in a majlis, his own explanation of British motives to an Arabian court — is the value. Out of copyright.
4 citations · 4 chaptersEmirate of Nejd, Emirate of Jabal Shammar, Sharifate of Mecca
William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Peru (1847)
prescott-1847A 19th-century narrative synthesis drawing on the Spanish chronicle tradition, cited here for Atahualpa's execution by garrote on August 29, 1533, after a last-hour conversion to Christianity commuted his sentence from burning - an event outside the span of Xerez's own eyewitness account. An older synthesis rather than a modern academic monograph, used only for narrative it draws traceably from named chronicle sources. Public domain, open access via archive.org.
4 citations · 1 chapterProcopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars, Books III-IV: The Vandalic War (Loeb Classical Library, 1916)
procopius-vandalicBelisarius's secretary was on the expedition that destroyed the Vandal kingdom, and this is the account of somebody who was standing there. He opens with a hundred years of Vandal history from Roman sources and then shifts into eyewitness reporting, and the change of register is visible. Out of copyright.
4 citations · 4 chaptersMartha T. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, in Writings from the Ancient World 6, 2nd edn (Scholars Press, 1997)
roth-1997Translations of the Mesopotamian and Hittite law collections in one volume — the laws of Ur-Nammu, of Lipit-Ishtar, of Eshnunna, of Hammurabi, the Middle Assyrian laws and the Hittite laws. Cited on this site wherever a page quotes or dates one of them, which is on four records in the Ancient Near East and nowhere else in the corpus.
4 citations · 2 chaptersArchibald Henry Sayce, The Hittites: The Story of a Forgotten Empire (Religious Tract Society, 1888)
sayce-1888Written eighteen years before Hattusa was excavated and twenty-seven before Hittite was deciphered, by the Assyriologist who had argued the empire's existence into scholarly acceptance from Egyptian and biblical evidence alone. Almost every particular in it has since been corrected; what it records exactly is the moment when a great power had been recovered as a name and not yet as a language, a capital or a history. Out of copyright.
4 citations · 4 chaptersTacitus, trans. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb, The Annals (1895)
tacitus-church-brodribbCovers, in Book VI, Pharasmanes of Iberia's 35 AD campaign to install his brother Mithridates on the Armenian throne against the Parthian prince Orodes; and, in Book XII, Pharasmanes's son Rhadamistus's 53 AD murder of the same Mithridates and brief seizure of Armenia, including the flight and near-death of Rhadamistus's wife Zenobia. Open access via archive.org.
4 citations · 2 chaptersGeoffrey de Villehardouin, The Chronicle of Geoffry de Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne and Romania, Concerning the Conquest of Constantinople (William Pickering, 1829)
villehardouin-smithThe marshal of Champagne was one of the six envoys who negotiated the shipping contract with Venice, was present at every stage of the Fourth Crusade, and dictated this account afterwards in French. It is the first substantial prose narrative in the language and the fullest eyewitness record of the conquest — written by a man who had been personally responsible for the decisions he is describing and who never once suggests that the expedition should have gone to Egypt as agreed. Out of copyright.
4 citations · 4 chaptersJohn White, A Voyage to Cochin China (Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1824)
white-cochinchina-1824An American merchant captain's account of a trading voyage to Saigon, including a historical sketch of the Tay Son wars drawn from the same tradition of sources as Barrow's account. Cited here for the 1802 fall of Hue and the reunification of Cochinchina and Tonquin under Nguyen Anh (Gia Long), and for Bishop Adran's postwar reforms.
4 citations · 1 chapterAnonymous, with Abu Zayd al-Sirafi, Ancient Accounts of India and China, by Two Mohammedan Travellers, Who Went to Those Parts in the Ninth Century (Sam. Harding, 1733)
akhbar-renaudotTwo ninth-century Arabic texts on the sea route from the Gulf to China — the first a merchant's account of the voyage and of Tang China, the second a commentary written at Siraf about 916 by a man who questioned returning sailors. They are the earliest description of that route by people who used it, and they are practical: which port a ship loads at and why, how many leagues to the next watering place, which strait the China ships will not attempt. Renaudot's 1733 English is loose and his notes are of their century. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 3 chaptersAristakes Lastivertsi, History Regarding the Sufferings Occasioned by Foreign Peoples (Sources of the Armenian Tradition, 1985)
aristakes-bedrosianAn Armenian cleric writing in the 1070s about the two decades he had lived through: the surrender of Ani to Byzantium in 1045, the Seljuk raids, the sack of Ani in 1064 and Manzikert in 1071. The translation is in the public domain by the translator's gift. Aristakes is writing a lament and reads the whole period as punishment for Armenian sin, which shapes his emphases but not his facts; he is precise about who handed over what and what they were paid for it, and he is bitter about it, which is the reason the detail survives at all.
3 citations · 2 chaptersDuarte Barbosa, The Book of Duarte Barbosa (Hakluyt Society, 1918)
barbosa-damesA Portuguese official who spent years in India as a factor and interpreter and compiled, about 1518, a description of every coast from the Cape to China. He is very good on what a port contained, what it traded and who it obeyed, and for the East African towns he is the first outsider to describe them after the Portuguese arrival — which is also the limit of him: the sackings are reported as the just consequence of a king's arrogance, and the interior he gives at second hand from the Sofala traders. Dames's notes are a separate authority and are cited as his where used. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 2 chaptersV. V. Barthold, Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion (Luzac (E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Series), 1928)
barthold-1928The second edition of the survey Barthold published in Russian in 1900, still the standard account of Transoxiana between the Arab conquest and Chinggis Khan, and the only one built from a systematic reading of the Arabic and Persian sources side by side with the coinage. He argues with his authorities in the footnotes — rejecting Ibn al-Athir's two campaigns of Bughra-Khan because Gardizi and Bayhaqi agree on a single date, doubting Tha'alibi's estimate of his own informants — and the reader can usually see which chronicle each sentence rests on. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 3 chaptersGhaznavid Empire, Karakhanid Khanate, Ma'munid Khwarazmshahs
François Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656-1668 (Oxford University Press, 1916)
bernier-constableA French physician who spent twelve years in India, most of them attached to a senior noble of Aurangzeb's court, and who watched the war of succession from close range. He is the sharpest European observer of the Mughal state in the seventeenth century and the origin of a very influential argument — that all land belonged to the crown, that there was no secure private property, and that this explained everything he thought was wrong with India. The argument travelled to Montesquieu and Marx as "oriental despotism" and has been contested by every historian of Mughal revenue since. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 2 chaptersPeter Borschberg, Urban Impermanence on the Southern Malay Peninsula: The Case of Batu Sawar Johor (1587-c.1615) (Journal of East-Asian Urban History, Vol. 3 No. 1, 2021)
borschberg-2021Built on VOC factory records and the published account of Admiral Cornelis Matelieff, who surveyed Batu Sawar's defences in 1606. Cited here for Johor's early capitals, the Portuguese blockades of 1603-1604 and 1609-1610, the court factionalism among Sultan Ali Jalla's four sons, and Iskandar Muda's Acehnese conquest of Batu Sawar in 1613 and again in 1615. Open access.
3 citations · 1 chapterJames Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, Volume IV: The Twentieth to the Twenty-Sixth Dynasties (University of Chicago Press, 1906)
breasted-1906-ivThe fourth volume of Breasted's translation of the Egyptian historical inscriptions, covering the long fragmentation and the Kushite and Saite recoveries. Its centrepiece is the Piye stela from Gebel Barkal, which Breasted prints in full with a section-by-section apparatus and calls the most instructive surviving document on the internal political condition of Egypt in a period without a central power. The translation is a century old and a few readings have since been revised; the run of the narrative, which is what a reader wants from it, has not. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 3 chaptersJohn Lewis Burckhardt, Travels in Nubia (John Murray, for the African Association, 1819)
burckhardt-nubiaBurckhardt went up the Nile in 1813 and 1814 disguised as a poor Syrian trader, on very little money, and wrote down the stages, the prices and the ruins. He had no interest in Christian Nubia and did not know what he was looking at when he passed it: the churches he notes on the hills are recorded as Greek because they were Christian and looked Byzantine to him. That incuriosity is what makes the observations useful, since he had no thesis to fit them to. Published posthumously. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 3 chaptersVerney Lovett Cameron, Across Africa (1877)
cameron-1877-across-africaThe published journal of the first European to cross equatorial Africa coast to coast (1873-1875), passing through Kazembe's own Luapula territory and Ulunda itself in 1874-75. Records a Mwata Yamvo who had died about a year before Cameron's visit, his cruel and short-lived successor's overthrow by his own sister and half-brother, and the deposed ruler fleeing to solicit help from his kinsman Kasongo of Urua - contemporary eyewitness evidence of Lunda's own mid-1870s succession instability. Open access via archive.org.
3 citations · 1 chapterCassiodorus, The Letters of Cassiodorus, Being a Condensed Translation of the Variae Epistolae (Henry Frowde, 1886)
cassiodorus-hodgkinThe official correspondence of the Ostrogothic kingdom, written by the man who ran it and published by him afterwards to demonstrate that his influence had always been exerted on the side of good government. It is therefore both the best source for how that state actually worked and a defence brief. Hodgkin condenses and paraphrases some letters and translates others in full, and his long biographical introduction is itself the standard account of Cassiodorus's career. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 3 chaptersEdmund Curtis, Roger of Sicily and the Normans in Lower Italy, 1016-1154 (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1912)
curtis-1912A narrative of the Hauteville conquest and Roger II's reign built directly on Amari and the Arabic sources alongside the Latin chroniclers, and unusually careful about saying which of them is being followed and where they disagree. It stops at Roger's death, so it carries nothing about the kingdom's last forty years. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 3 chaptersFaxian, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms (Clarendon Press, 1886)
faxian-leggeA Chinese monk who walked to India in 399 to find a complete copy of the monastic rules, spent about a decade there, and came home by sea. He is the only eyewitness account of Gupta India by an outsider, and his interests are narrow and consistent: monasteries, relics, discipline, and what the roads were like. What he says about government and society is incidental, which is exactly why it is useful — he had no reason to flatter anybody and no theory of Indian kingship to defend. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 2 chaptersGeorge Finlay, History of the Byzantine and Greek Empires, 1057-1453, in A History of Greece, from its Conquest by the Romans to the Present Time, Vol. III (1854)
finlay-1854Covers John II Komnenos's reign in full - his friendship with the Turkish-born prime minister Axouchos, his sister Anna Komnene's failed conspiracy against him, his 1143 death by a poisoned hunting arrow - and Manuel I Komnenos's reign through the 1176 defeat at Myriokephalon and its aftermath. Open access via archive.org.
3 citations · 2 chaptersAnonymous, The First Book of the Maccabees, in The Holy Bible according to the Authorized Version, with an Explanatory and Critical Commentary, Volume II (Apocrypha) (John Murray, 1888)
first-maccabees-waceA Jewish history of the years 175 to 134 BC, written in Hebrew in the generation after the events and surviving in Greek, by an author committed to the Hasmonean family and hostile to everyone who opposed them. Its unusual value is that it quotes documents — letters, treaties, and the decree of 140 BC that made Simon high priest and ethnarch — at what looks like full length. Wace's edition prints the Authorized Version text with a commentary that argues with it, including over whether the writer has reported the Roman correspondence accurately. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 2 chaptersNevill Forbes, Bulgaria, in The Balkans: A History of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Rumania, Turkey (Clarendon Press, 1915)
forbes-1915Forbes wrote the Bulgarian and Serbian sections of a wartime Oxford volume, and the date shows: the book was published to explain the Balkans to a British public whose government was fighting in them, and its judgements about national character should be left alone. What it is good for is the sequence of the nineteenth-century revival, which Forbes sets out concretely — who funded the schools, when the church broke with Constantinople, what the Exarchate was — and the aftermath of 1018, where he is specific about what happened to the see at Ohrid. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 3 chaptersIbn Battuta, translated by H. A. R. Gibb and C. F. Beckingham, The Travels of Ibn Battuta, A.D. 1325-1354, in Works issued by the Hakluyt Society, Second Series (The Hakluyt Society, 1994)
gibb-battutaThe complete four-volume Hakluyt translation, finished in 1994 by Beckingham decades after Gibb began it. Ibn Battuta reached a striking number of the polities on this site — Delhi, Mali, Kilwa, Pasai — and this is the first record here to cite him. He is an eyewitness who wrote afterwards from memory and from other people's books, and the record that uses him says which of his claims it is relying on.
3 citations · 1 chapterJost Gippert, Wolfgang Schulze, Zaza Aleksidze and Jean-Pierre Mahé, The Caucasian Albanian Palimpsests of Mount Sinai, in Monumenta Palaeographica Medii Aevi: Series Ibero-Caucasica 2 (Brepols, 2008)
gippert-2008The first edition of the only substantial texts in Caucasian Albanian, recovered from the erased under-layers of two Georgian manuscripts at St Catherine's on Sinai — identified by Aleksidze in 1996 and read by an international project over the following decade. Cited for the chapter on a script that was lost for a thousand years, because the manner of its recovery is the evidence and not an anecdote about it.
3 citations · 1 chapterJonas Hanway, An Historical Account of the British Trade over the Caspian Sea, with a Journal of Travels, to which are added the Revolutions of Persia (Printed for Mr. Dodsley, 1753)
hanway-1753Written by an English merchant of the Russia Company who went to Persia in the 1740s to open a Caspian trade, lost his goods in a rebellion, and came home and explained why the venture had failed. It is not scholarship and does not claim to be; its value is that it is contemporary, that Hanway talked to people who had been in the room, and that his interest was commercial rather than dynastic — so he records the condition of the country and the collection of revenue in a way the court chronicles do not. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 3 chaptersRobert Francis Harper, The Code of Hammurabi, King of Babylon, about 2250 B.C. (University of Chicago Press, 1904)
harper-1904The autographed text, transliteration and translation of the Susa stele, published two years after it was dug up, with an introduction describing the object and its condition. Its chronology is five centuries out and its framing is frankly biblical — both of which make it a good record of what the discovery meant at the moment it was made. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 3 chaptersSelect Historical Documents of the Middle Ages (George Bell and Sons, 1896)
henderson-1896A working collection of the constitutional documents of medieval Europe in English: Charlemagne's capitularies, the papal and imperial letters of the investiture quarrel, the Concordat of Worms, the Besançon correspondence, the Golden Bull, Magna Carta. The translations are Victorian, sometimes stiff and occasionally loose, and Henderson's linking commentary takes the imperial side more often than not; the documents themselves are what this is used for, and they are the words the parties actually exchanged. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 3 chaptersMichael Jursa, Aspects of the Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium BC: Economic Geography, Economic Mentalities, Agriculture, the Use of Money and the Problem of Economic Growth, in Alter Orient und Altes Testament 377 (Ugarit-Verlag, 2010)
jursa-2010Built on more than 21,500 dated tablets from Babylon, Borsippa, Nippur, Sippar and Uruk. This site's Neo-Babylonian revenue and military bases are coded from it rather than from a political narrative, because it is the only work in this corpus's bibliography that can say what a state's income actually consisted of from primary accounts rather than from a chronicler.
3 citations · 1 chapterL. W. King and R. C. Thompson, The Sculptures and Inscription of Darius the Great on the Rock of Behistun in Persia (British Museum, 1907)
king-thompson-1907A fresh collation of the three versions of the Behistun inscription made on the rock itself, with the Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian texts printed together and a full index of proper names in all three. Its use here is that index, which is where the Babylonian name for the province the Persians called Armina can be read off directly. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 3 chaptersJudasz Tadeusz Krusiński, The History of the Revolution of Persia, taken from the memoirs of Father Krusinski, Procurator of the Jesuits at Ispahan (Printed for J. Pemberton, 1728)
krusinski-1728An eyewitness account of the fall of Isfahan by a Jesuit who had lived in the city for years, spoke the language, knew the court, and was inside the walls for the whole of the six-month siege. He despised the Safavid government and says so, so his explanations of the decline — the princes raised in the harem, the eunuchs, the ministers — should be read as the judgement of a hostile and extremely well-placed observer rather than as analysis. On what happened during the siege itself he is the fullest testimony that exists, and it is not pleasant. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 3 chaptersHermann Kulke, K. Kesavapany and Vijay Sakhuja (eds), Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa: Reflections on the Chola Naval Expeditions to Southeast Asia (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009)
kulke-2009Twenty specialists on one event — Rajendra Chola's raid of 1025 on the ports of the Melaka strait — from the Indian side, the Southeast Asian side and the archaeology. Cited here because it is the only sustained treatment of the single most consequential thing that happened to Srivijaya, and because the Chola state that launched it has no record on this site.
3 citations · 1 chapterRalph-Johannes Lilie, trans. J. C. Morris and Jean E. Ridings, Byzantium and the Crusader States 1096-1204 (Clarendon Press, 1993)
lilie-1993The standard treatment of the imperial claim on Antioch: the oath at Constantinople in 1097, the treaty of Devol in 1108, and the two occasions on which an emperor came in person to collect what those documents said was his. Cited for the one edge in this corpus that makes a Frankish state a Byzantine vassal.
3 citations · 1 chapterLiudprand of Cremona, The Works of Liudprand of Cremona (Routledge, 1930)
liudprand-wrightA north Italian bishop who went to Constantinople twice — in 949 as an envoy of Berengar of Italy, and in 968 as Otto I's ambassador to negotiate a marriage — and wrote both journeys up for western readers. The first account is admiring and the second is a sustained insult, because the second embassy went badly and he was writing to explain why. He is therefore a hostile witness who cannot help recording how impressive the thing he is belittling was. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 3 chaptersHerbert Maxwell, Robert the Bruce and the Struggle for Scottish Independence (1897)
maxwell-1897A narrative biography covering Bruce's campaigns and the Battle of Bannockburn (1314) in detail, including the single combat between Bruce and Henry de Bohun and the battle's casualty lists. Open access via archive.org.
3 citations · 1 chapterColin McEvedy and Richard Jones, Atlas of World Population History (Penguin Books, 1978)
mcevedy-jones-1978Source for peak population and for the world-population denominators used by era-normalised mode.
3 citationsCited by the era-normalised denominators, not by a polity record.
John L. Meloy, Imperial Power and Maritime Trade: Mecca and Cairo in the Later Middle Ages, in Chicago Studies on the Middle East (Middle East Documentation Center, 2010)
meloy-2010Reads the sharifate as a polity with a political economy rather than as a religious appendage of somebody else's empire: its alliances in the Hejaz, its relations with Cairo, and its dependence on the Indian Ocean traffic through Jeddah. Written partly from sources composed by Meccan scholars rather than only from the Egyptian material, which is why the city has agency in it.
3 citations · 1 chapterMinhaj-i-Siraj Juzjani, Tabakat-i-Nasiri: A General History of the Muhammadan Dynasties of Asia (Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1881)
minhaj-raverty-1881A contemporary Persian court chronicle by a writer who held office under Sultan Raziyyat herself (Kazi of Gwalior, appointed to the Nasiriyah College at Delhi during her reign) and who defends her directly against later insinuations about her Abyssinian master of horse, Jamal-ud-Din Yakut, calling them unsupported by anything in the sources closest to events. Raverty's own translation carries extensive critical footnotes correcting later, secondhand accounts (including Ibn Battuta's garbled version of her reign and family) against Minhaj's own contemporary testimony. Used here for her father Iltutmish's decision to name her heir over his own sons, her suppression of the nobles' revolt against her accession, her adoption of male dress and open appearances riding an elephant, the revolt of Altunia at Tabarhindah, and her death fighting alongside him after their own troops deserted them in 1240. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 1 chapterKate Norgate, England under the Angevin Kings, Volume I (Macmillan and Co., 1887)
norgate-angevin-v1-1887A detailed narrative history of England and Normandy under Henry I, Stephen and the house of Anjou. Used here for the battle of Tinchebray on Michaelmas Eve 1106 - fought exactly forty years after William the Conqueror's landing at Pevensey - in which Henry I defeated and captured his own brother, Duke Robert Curthose, reuniting Normandy with England; Robert's subsequent lifelong captivity, ending only with his death nearly three decades later, shortly before Henry I's own death in 1135; and Geoffrey of Anjou's campaign to win Normandy by conquest for his wife the Empress Matilda, completed with the surrender of Rouen in January 1144 and of the last holdout fortress, Arques, the following summer. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 1 chapterThe Chronicle of Novgorod, 1016-1471 (Camden Society, 1914)
novgorod-michellThe town chronicle of the one major Russian city the Mongols never sacked, kept year by year and translated complete. It is annalistic and uneven — some years hold a single line about a fire or a frost — and its writers are clergy whose framework is that disaster is punishment for sin, which produces the repeated epithets: the godless, the lawless Ishmaelites, the accursed raw-eating Tartars. What it also does is record dates, names of the dead, prices in famine years and the terms of demands, because a town chronicle is partly a municipal record. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 3 chaptersMustafa Kemal, A Speech Delivered by Ghazi Mustapha Kemal, President of the Turkish Republic, October 1927 (K. F. Koehler, 1929)
nutuk-1929Thirty-six hours of speech delivered over six days to the congress of his own party, published in English two years later. It is the founder's account of how the Ottoman state was ended and the republic made, composed at the height of his power, and it is a work of self-justification by a man with no surviving rivals: everyone he quarrelled with is in it, and their side is not. Used here for what he says he did and why he says he did it, which is documentary regardless of whether the reasons are the real ones. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 2 chaptersWilliam Gifford Palgrave, Narrative of a Year's Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia, 1862-63 (Macmillan, 1865)
palgrave-1865A Jesuit of Jewish descent travelling under a false identity as a Syrian doctor, who reached Ha'il and Riyadh and spent weeks at the court of Faysal ibn Turki. He is the only detailed eyewitness of the second Saudi state at its height. He also detested Wahhabism, wrote to be read in London, and has been accused since of embroidering; his descriptions of places and arrangements are worth much more than his verdicts on people, which are frequently vicious. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 3 chaptersWilliam H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843)
prescott-1843A 19th-century narrative synthesis drawing on Spanish-archive and indigenous manuscript sources, cited here for its account of Nezahualcoyotl's flight from the Tepanec usurper Maxtla and his restoration to the throne of Texcoco - the story underlying the Triple Alliance's own formation. An older synthesis rather than a modern academic monograph; used only for narrative it draws traceably from named sources. Public domain, open access via archive.org (two volumes).
3 citations · 2 chaptersCarl Christian Reindorf, History of the Gold Coast and Asante: Based on Traditions and Historical Facts, Comprising a Period of More Than Three Centuries from About 1500 to 1860 (Author (Basel Mission printing press), 1895)
reindorf-1895The first substantial history of the Gold Coast and Asante written by an African author, a Ga-Danish Basel Mission pastor working from oral testimony gathered over decades alongside Dutch and Danish records. Cited here for the eighteenth-century Asante succession this site had not yet drawn on directly: Opoku Ware's 1731 accession after Osei Tutu's death at Koromante, his wars of conquest, Kusi Obodom's humane and constitutionally restrained reign, Osei Kwadwo's campaigns and administrative reforms, and Osei Kwame's deposition and suicide, ending at Osei Bonsu's accession. Open access via archive.org.
3 citations · 2 chaptersJalal al-Din al-Suyuti, History of the Caliphs (Tarikh al-Khulafa') (Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1881)
suyuti-jarrettWritten in Cairo in the 1490s by a scholar who had grown up in the household of one of the caliphs he describes and whose father drafted their documents. It is the only history of the caliphate written from inside the Cairo Abbasid establishment, and it quotes the paperwork. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 3 chaptersGeorge McCall Theal, History of South Africa since September 1795, Vol. II: The Cape Colony from 1828 to 1846, Natal from 1824 to 1845 and Proceedings of the Emigrant Farmers from 1836 to 1847 (Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1908)
theal-1908-v2Continues theal-1908-v1. Used here for the Voortrekker wars against Moselekatse: the October 1836 Matabele raid that killed the Liebenberg and Erasmus hunting parties, the battle of Vechtkop the same month, and the November 1837 commando under Potgieter and Uys that broke Moselekatse's army on the Marikwa river and drove the Matabele in flight beyond the Limpopo, after which Potgieter proclaimed the abandoned country forfeited to the emigrants. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 1 chapterFrançois Baron de Tott, Memoirs of the Baron de Tott on the Turks and the Tartars (G. G. J. and J. Robinson, London, 1786)
tott-1786A French officer of Hungarian descent sent to reside with the khan of the Crimea in 1767, who accompanied the Tatar army on its last great raid into Russian territory and later reorganised Ottoman artillery. He is vain, a good observer of technical things, and writing to be read in Paris. The English edition used here prints alongside him the hostile Observations of Charles de Peyssonnel, French consul in the Crimea before him, who corrects his facts and supplies eyewitness detail of his own; where the two disagree the disagreement is on the page, which is the best thing about the volume. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 3 chaptersJ. L. Vellut, in J. F. A. Ajayi (ed.), General History of Africa, Volume VI: Africa in the Nineteenth Century until the 1880s, in Chapter 12, "The Congo Basin and Angola" (UNESCO Publishing / Heinemann / University of California Press, 1989)
vellut-1989Cited here for the Luba state's own first-half-of-the-nineteenth- century territorial height under the Mulopwe title, its 1870s-80s fragmentation under Kasongo Kalombo as Swahili and Angolan trading caravans - including Tippu Tip's 1875 trading principality at Kasongo - drew regional chiefs into competing commercial networks, and the resulting near-total chiefdom autonomy by the close of the period covered.
3 citations · 1 chapterOliver Wardrop, The Kingdom of Georgia: notes of travel in a land of woman, wine and song (Sampson Low, 1888)
wardrop-1888A young Englishman's travel book, written eighty-seven years after the Russian annexation, with appended sketches of Georgian history and literature and a bibliography. The framing is entirely of its period — the subtitle is a fair warning, and the passages about Georgia's neighbours are worse — and it is used here for the two things it is a first-hand witness to: what a traveller found on the ground under Russian administration in the 1880s, and what Georgians themselves told him about Rustaveli and what they did with his poem. Out of copyright.
3 citations · 3 chaptersGernot Wilhelm, trans. Jennifer Barnes, The Hurrians, in Ancient Near East Series (Aris & Phillips, 1989)
wilhelm-1989The survey of the Hurrian-speaking world by the principal authority on the language, with a chapter on the archaeology by Diana L. Stein. Cited here because Mitanni cannot be written from a political narrative alone: no archive of the kingdom survives, and what is known about how it worked comes from Hurrian material found at the places it ruled rather than from the place it ruled them from.
3 citations · 2 chaptersPaul E. Zimansky, Ecology and Empire: The Structure of the Urartian State, in Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 41 (Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1985)
zimansky-1985An argument that the Urartian state was a superstructure of royal fortresses and state agriculture imposed on a landscape that could not have produced it unaided, built as a response to the Assyrian army. This site's Urartian institutions are coded from it, and its `revenue_basis` turns on Zimansky's account of how the fortress estates were stocked.
3 citations · 1 chapterAbu Salih the Armenian, The Churches and Monasteries of Egypt and Some Neighbouring Countries (Clarendon Press, 1895)
abu-salih-evettsA thirteenth-century survey of the Christian buildings of Egypt, with chapters on Nubia and Ethiopia appended, compiled by a writer whose own name is uncertain. The Egyptian material is first-hand and the Nubian is not: he does not say where he got it, and it arrives mixed with folklore about invisible harvesters and mountains whose water cannot be reached. It is nonetheless the fullest description of Christian Nubia from outside it, and Evetts and Butler's notes set it against the other Arabic geographers. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersLetter from King Afonso I of Kongo to King João III of Portugal, 6 July 1526, in Monumenta Missionaria Africana (trans. Basil Davidson)
afonso-letter-1526Afonso's own protest against the depopulation of his kingdom by Portuguese traders and the corruption of his officials by the slave trade - "we cannot reckon how great the damage is, since the said merchants are taking every day our natives... it is our will that in these kingdoms there should not be any trade in slaves." Read via the 1619 Education Project's translated-text mirror. Primary source, open access.
2 citations · 1 chapterJohn F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus (Longmans, Green, 1908)
baddeley-1908The standard English narrative of the Murid wars, written from the Russian military archives and from travel over the ground. Baddeley is a sympathetic outsider to both sides: he refuses the Russian literature's account of the movement as fanaticism, refuses equally to romanticise Shamil, and presses the charge of cruelty. His closing assessment — that Muridism was in the long run the instrument rather than the enemy of Russian rule, an argument he credits to Shamil's own claim in captivity — is the reason he is cited here. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersAhmad ibn Yahya al-Baladhuri, The Origins of the Islamic State (Kitab Futuh al-Buldan), Part II (Columbia University, 1924)
baladhuri-murgottenThe continuation Hitti did not translate, covering the eastern provinces: the Jibal, Adharbaijan, Basra, Khuzistan, Fars and Kirman, Sijistan and Kabul, Khurasan and Sind. Where Hitti's volume carries the Syrian campaign, this one carries the decade after Nihawand, and it is the better source for what the reduction of the Iranian plateau actually consisted of: raids launched from a garrison and returning to it, districts taken by force or by capitulation on stated terms, and covenants broken and re-imposed under a later governor. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersPaul-Alain Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus, King of Babylon 556-539 B.C., in Yale Near Eastern Researches 10 (Yale University Press, 1989)
beaulieu-1989The monograph on the ten years the king spent at Tayma. Cited here for the dates of the departure and return and for the argument that the quarrel was political and economic before it was religious, against the older reading that made Nabonidus a heretic.
2 citations · 1 chapterGary Beckman, Hittite Diplomatic Texts, in Writings from the Ancient World 7, 2nd edn (Scholars Press, 1999)
beckman-1999Translations of twenty-one treaties, eighteen diplomatic letters and eighteen edicts from the Hittite chancery, including the Shattiwaza treaty this corpus's Mitanni record is largely reconstructed from and the Hittite text of the 1259 treaty with Egypt. A source of documents rather than of argument, and cited where a page quotes or dates one.
2 citations · 1 chapterEdwyn Robert Bevan, The House of Seleucus, in Vol. I (Edward Arnold, 1902)
bevan-1902A continuous narrative of the Seleucid dynasty that, in the course of covering the Seleucid civil war of the 230s, gives the fullest accessible account of early Pontic history between the founder's death and Pharnaces I: Ariobarzanes's obscure reign, the Galatian mercenary famine during Mithridates II's minority, and Mithridates II's decisive intervention for Antiochus Hierax at the Battle of Ancyra. Open access via archive.org.
2 citations · 1 chapterKhalid Yahya Blankinship, The End of the Jihad State: The Reign of Hisham Ibn 'Abd al-Malik and the Collapse of the Umayyads, in SUNY Series in Medieval Middle East History (State University of New York Press, 1994)
blankinship-1994The argument that the Umayyad state was structurally financed by continuing conquest and could not survive its stopping. Cited here for the Umayyad revenue coding — it is the source that treats campaign proceeds as structural income rather than as something armies did — and for the second siege of Constantinople as the point the expansion met a limit it never passed.
2 citationsT. Edward Bowdich, Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (John Murray, 1819)
bowdich-1819The African Company's mission to Kumasi in 1817, written up by a twenty-six-year-old who spent several months there and drew and measured everything. He was negotiating on behalf of a trading company with an interest in the outcome, and his judgements about Asante intentions should be read with that in front of you. His descriptions are unusually exact, including of the human sacrifice he witnessed and would not soften. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersBertrandon de la Broquière, The Travels of Bertrandon de la Broquière to Palestine, and His Return from Jerusalem Overland to France, During the Years 1432 and 1433 (Hafod Press, 1807)
broquiere-johnesThe first esquire-carver to Philip the Good of Burgundy, sent east in the guise of a pilgrim and returning overland through Anatolia and the Balkans to report on whether a crusade could be got through. He is therefore a spy writing a route survey: distances, garrisons, which lord hates which, and how many men each could raise. That purpose makes him credulous about anything that argues for the expedition and precise about everything a quartermaster would need. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersEdward G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Volume I: From the Earliest Times until Firdawsi (T. Fisher Unwin, 1902)
browne-1902A survey of Persian letters from the Achaemenids to about 1000, written by a Cambridge orientalist working through the Persian and Arabic anthologies — Awfi, Dawlatshah, Nizami-i-Arudi — and quoting them at length in his own verse translations. Its value here is that it prints the whole surviving early material rather than a selection: it is how one can see that the entire Persian poetic output of the Tahirid period, as the anthologists knew it, is two couplets by one man. Browne is candid about which of his anecdotes are late and unreliable, and says so before quoting them. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersJames Bruce of Kinnaird, Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, in the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 (G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1790)
bruce-1790-nileA Scottish traveler who spent nearly two years at the Gondarine court in the 1770s, close enough to the events to have known people who remembered them, and who prefaced his own travel narrative with a reign-by-reign chronicle of the dynasty back to Fasilides - the founder of Gondar - compiled from court annals and informants. Cited here for the 1630s expulsion of the Jesuit mission, the reign and assassination of Yasous I (Yasous the Great), and the run of short, frequently violent successions that followed through Joas's own reign, ending at the rise of Ras Mikael Sehul this site's existing 1769 turning point already covers. Bruce is a partial and sometimes self-aggrandising narrator of his own travels, but his dynastic chronicle draws on sources not otherwise available in English. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersE. A. Wallis Budge, The Egyptian Sûdân: Its History and Monuments (J. B. Lippincott Company, 1907)
budge-egyptian-sudan-1907A British Museum Egyptologist's two-volume survey, drawing on his own excavations at Gebel Barkal and Meroë alongside translations of the Napatan royal stelae. Cited here, in the absence of access to welsby-1996 (lending-restricted), for the reign of Aspelta - his own coronation stela's account of the election ritual before the statue of Amen-Ra at Gebel Barkal, and his descent traced through six generations of royal women - and for Herodotus's account of Cambyses's failed invasion of Nubia around 525 BC, presented here as the classical historian's own story rather than as verified fact. Some of Budge's regnal dates and orderings for this period have since been revised by later scholarship; this is noted rather than silently corrected. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 1 chapterJohn Lewis Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia, Comprehending an Account of those Territories in Hedjaz which the Mohammedans Regard as Sacred (Henry Colburn, 1829)
burckhardt-1829A Swiss traveller in Egyptian service who reached Mecca in 1814, passed as a Muslim, performed the pilgrimage and stayed months, arriving in the year Muhammad Ali's army was taking the Hijaz back from the Wahhabis and the last independent sharif was being removed. He is an exact and unromantic observer of what things cost, who collected which tax, which fort was built by whom, and what the townspeople said about the government they had just lost. His contempt for particular people is frequent and can be left where he put it. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersG. Wyman Bury, Arabia Infelix, or the Turks in Yamen (Macmillan, 1915)
bury-1915A British traveller and political agent who lived in Yemen and Aden and knew the country and its languages, writing while the Ottoman vilayet still existed and Imam Yahya was in the middle of his career. He is valuable for the sequence of events between the Egyptian occupation and the 1911 settlement, which he sets out compactly and had partly witnessed. He is also a wartime propagandist with a low opinion of the people he is describing — the passages on Islamic law and on tribal religion are contemptuous, and his judgements are not to be borrowed. Cited here for what he reports, not for what he thinks of it. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersJohn of Plano Carpini, The Journey of Friar John of Pian de Carpine to the Court of Kuyuk Khan, 1245-47 (Hakluyt Society, 1900)
carpini-rockhillA Franciscan in his sixties sent to the Mongols by Innocent IV, who reached the imperial camp in time to watch Güyük enthroned in August 1246 and came back with the khan's reply. He was writing an intelligence report as much as a travel account — how the Mongols fight, how they besiege, what they do to a city that resists, and what a European army would need to do about it — and the practical register is what makes him useful. He is also a hostile witness who was cold, hungry and frightened for most of the journey, and says so. Printed by Rockhill in the same volume as Rubruck. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersCassius Dio, trans. Earnest Cary, Roman History, in Loeb Classical Library, Vol. VIII (1925)
cassius-dio-caryCovers, in the epitome of Book LXVIII, Trajan's 114 AD annexation of Armenia after Parthia installed Parthamasiris without Roman confirmation - the surrendered diadem at Elegeia, the "crownless and bloodless victory," and the brief interval in which Armenia was a Roman province rather than a kingdom at all. Open access via archive.org.
2 citations · 1 chapterJ. A. Boyle (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 5: The Saljuq and Mongol Periods (Cambridge University Press, 1968)
chi-52 citations · 1 chapterAbdul Momin Chowdhury, Dynastic History of Bengal, c. 750-1200 A.D. (Asiatic Society of Pakistan, 1967)
chowdhury-1967A dedicated dynastic history of early medieval Bengal working directly from copper-plate and stone inscriptions. Cited here for the succession crisis after Devapala's death - the disappearance of his named heir Yuvaraja Rajyapala, the rival charter lines of Surapala and Vigrahapala I, and the "period of stagnation" the author traces across the five kings between them - material later scholarship has revised in some particulars, but which is not used here for any finding this source does not itself support. Openly accessible via archive.org.
2 citations · 1 chapterAnonymous (Constantinople, 7th century), Chronicon Paschale, 284-628 AD (Liverpool University Press, 1989)
chronicon-paschale-whitby-1989A contemporary Constantinopolitan chronicle, our most detailed and precisely dated eyewitness source for the Avar-Persian siege of Constantinople in 626. Used here for the Avar vanguard's arrival on 29 June, the Chagan's negotiations with the envoy Athanasius and later with a second embassy including Theodore syncellus, the failed coordination between the Chagan and the Persian general Shahvaraz across the Bosporus, the destruction of the Slavic monoxyla flotilla in the Golden Horn on Thursday 7 August, and the Chagan's burning of his own siege engines and withdrawal on 8 August, declaring he was retreating for supplies rather than out of fear. A modern copyrighted translation, not a public-domain text, but the only complete English translation of this chronicle.
2 citations · 1 chapterMandell Creighton, A History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reformation, Vol. I: The Great Schism, The Council of Constance, 1378-1418 (1882)
creighton-1882Covers the disputed 1378 conclave that elected Urban VI under mob pressure, the rival election of Clement VII at Fondi that opened the Western Schism, and the Council of Pisa's 1409 attempt at resolution that briefly produced three competing popes at once. Open access via archive.org.
2 citations · 1 chapterMovses Dasxurantsi, History of the Aghuans (Sources of the Armenian Tradition, 2010)
dasxuranci-bedrosianThe only surviving history of Caucasian Albania, compiled in Armenian from earlier material and preserving documents, letters and eyewitness accounts that exist nowhere else; the translation is in the public domain by the translator's gift. The compiler is a churchman writing for a church, so the miracles and the relics get more space than the administration, and the long central section on the prince Juanshir reads as a panegyric by someone who knew him. Its value is that it is the country describing itself, in the century in which it stopped being able to.
2 citations · 1 chapterCassius Dio, Dio's Roman History (Pafraets, 1906)
dio-herbertA Roman senator of Greek descent who served under the Severans and wrote eighty books of Roman history, of which the third-century portion is contemporary testimony rather than compilation. Cited here for the Roman campaigns against Parthia, where he is unusually willing to say that a celebrated victory achieved nothing. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersVarious, The History of India, as Told by its Own Historians: The Muhammadan Period, Volume III (Trübner, 1871)
elliot-dowson-3The volume of the series that covers Timur's Indian campaign, printing side by side the *Malfuzat-i Timuri* — which presents itself as Timur's own memoirs, written in the first person — and Sharaf al-Din Yazdi's *Zafarnama*, which tells the same events in the third. The editors set out the case about the memoirs at length and do not settle it: the Persian text claims descent from a Turki original, the two books agree closely enough that one was plainly shaped to the other, and which way that shaping ran is disputed. What is not in question is that both were composed inside the Timurid house for Timurid readers, so that the self-justifications are the ones the dynasty wanted on the record. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 1 chapterWilliam Ellis, Polynesian Researches, During a Residence of Nearly Six Years in the South Sea Islands, Vol. II (Fisher, Son, & Jackson, 1829)
ellis-1829-v2The second volume of the same work, covering the consolidation of Christianity across the Society Islands after 1815. Used here for Pomare II's baptism on 16 July 1819 and his death on 7 December 1821, which the author, present in the islands at the time, calls "the heaviest bereavement that had occurred since the introduction of Christianity." Not used for the 21 April 1824 coronation of the infant Pomare III, which this volume also records: that event falls after this record's own span and belongs to a Tahiti under a different, regency government. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 1 chapterJean Froissart (trans. Thomas Johnes), Chronicles of England, France, Spain, and the Adjoining Countries, from the Latter Part of the Reign of Edward II to the Coronation of Henry IV, in Volume II (1849)
froissart-johnes-1849Thomas Johnes's full English translation of Froissart's fourteenth-century chronicle. Cited here for Froissart's own account, and his translator's annotated historiographical note, of the 1387 death of Charles II "the Bad" of Navarre - burned in his bed after a tax dispute with his own Pampeluna deputies, by the near-contemporary account Froissart says he was told at Foix, though a surviving letter from the king's own minister to his sister omits the fire entirely.
2 citations · 1 chapterUnknown, trans. Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, The Gallic Chronicle of 452 (452)
gallic-chronicle-452A contemporary annalistic chronicle, our earliest source for the Huns' destruction of Guntiarius's Burgundian kingdom on the Rhine (dated to the chronicle's own thirteenth regnal year of Theodosius II, 436) and the 443 grant of Sapaudia to the Burgundian survivors. Open access at aymennjawad.org.
2 citationsAnonymous, The Georgian Chronicle (Sources of the Armenian Tradition, 1991)
georgian-chronicle-bedrosianThe medieval Armenian adaptation of the Georgian royal chronicle *Kartlis Tskhovreba*, translated from classical Armenian and released by the translator into the public domain. It is a dynastic chronicle and behaves like one: the army sizes are epic rather than administrative, the kings speak in proverbs, and the genealogies run back to the Tower of Babel. What it preserves that no outside source does is the Iberian court's own account of its dealings with Iran and Byzantium — which refusal was made, in what words, and what the refusal cost.
2 citations · 2 chaptersAlessandro Giraffi, trans. James Howell, An Exact History of the Late Revolutions in Naples (1650)
giraffi-1650A contemporary (1647) eyewitness or near-eyewitness English translation covering the Masaniello revolt against the fruit tax in Naples in day-by-day detail, from the opening riot in the Piazza del Mercato through Masaniello's ten days as the people's own captain to his assassination in the Church of Carmine. Used here as a primary account of a contemporary rather than a settled modern secondary analysis. Public domain, open access via archive.org.
2 citations · 1 chapterJames Gordon, History of the Rebellion in Ireland in the Year 1798 (1801)
gordon-1801A near-contemporary account by a Church of Ireland clergyman who lived through the rebellion in County Wexford, covering the Wexford Bridge massacre of loyalist prisoners and the rebellion's suppression. Open access via archive.org.
2 citations · 1 chapterA. H. Hill, Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai, in Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (1960) link
hill-1960The Pasai chronicle in romanised Malay with an English translation and a long introduction, scanned in full and readable at the URL. Hill sets out the north Sumatran background from the Chinese records and Marco Polo, argues against Snouck Hurgronje's dismissal of the text as a children's tale, and traces the single surviving manuscript from a Javanese regent's library in Demak to the Royal Asiatic Society in London.
2 citations · 2 chaptersSir Jerome Horsey and Giles Fletcher, Russia at the Close of the Sixteenth Century (Hakluyt Society, 1856)
horsey-fletcher-bond-1856Horsey was an English Muscovy Company agent resident in Russia from 1573; his account of Devlet Geray's 1571 burning of Moscow, written up later from what he saw and was told, is a foreigner's record of a catastrophe rather than an eyewitness minute of it, but he was in the country within two years of the event and knew people who had lived through it - the ransacked river choked with the drowned, the fire finished in six hours, Devlet Geray's envoy sent to taunt Ivan with a knife. Fletcher, a later English ambassador, supplies the diplomatic framing. Cited for the Crimean Khanate.
2 citations · 1 chapterC. E. Bosworth, GHAZNAVIDS, in Encyclopaedia Iranica link
iranica-ghaznavids2 citationsAnthony Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome (Harvard University Press, 2015)
kaldellis-2015Argues that the eastern Roman empire was a republican monarchy rather than a theocracy: the emperor held power on behalf of a res publica that could and did withdraw its acceptance, and the frequency of depositions is evidence of a constitution rather than of chaos. Contested, and cited on this site where a coded field turns on it, with the disagreement stated.
2 citations · 1 chapterThe Kebra Nagast, The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelek (Medici Society, 1922)
kebra-nagast-budgeThe Ethiopian national epic, in the form assembled at Aksum in the early fourteenth century by a scribe named Isaac, with Budge's introduction and his summary of what Isaac believed he was doing. It is not evidence about Solomon or about the tenth century BC. It is first-rate evidence about what a fourteenth-century Ethiopian court wanted its dynasty's title to rest on, which is what it is used for here. Budge's translation is dated and his commentary more so. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersPaul J. Kosmin, The Land of the Elephant Kings: Space, Territory, and Ideology in the Seleucid Empire (Harvard University Press, 2014)
kosmin-2014Asks what a dynasty does when it rules an enormous territory to which it has no historic claim, and answers it from the city foundations, the royal progresses, the frontier treaties and the geography the Seleucids commissioned. It is the modern argument this site needed for a polity whose page had been drafted from a volume published in 1983.
2 citations · 1 chapterAlfred L. Kroeber, Archaeological Explorations in Peru, Part II (Field Museum of Natural History, 1930)
kroeber-peru-1930A continuation of the author's north-coast survey work. Used here for the polychrome mural paintings first noted at the Huaca de la Luna by Eduard Seler in 1910 and rediscovered, more extensively, in 1925-26, depicting a battle between human figures and personified weapons and tools - the same "revolt of the artifacts" myth documented elsewhere in ancient Mexico. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 1 chapterAlfred L. Kroeber, Archaeological Explorations in Peru, Part I: Ancient Pottery from Trujillo (Field Museum of Natural History, 1926)
kroeber-trujillo-1926A site survey by an early excavator of the Peruvian north coast, following up on Max Uhle's pioneering 1899 excavations at the ruins of Moche for the University of California. Used here for the physical description of the two great earthen pyramids of the site, the Huaca del Sol and the smaller terraced Huaca de la Luna, standing on the plain between the Cerro Blanco hill and the Moche river a few kilometers from the Pacific coast. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 1 chapterGiovanni B. Lanfranchi, Michael Roaf and Robert Rollinger (eds), Continuity of Empire (?): Assyria, Media, Persia, in History of the Ancient Near East Monographs V (S.a.r.g.o.n., 2003)
lanfranchi-2003The proceedings of the Padua meeting of 2001, and the volume in which the case against the Median empire was assembled: that the Assyrian and Babylonian records describe Median chiefs rather than a Median state, that the archaeology supplies no administration, and that the empire Herodotus describes may be a Greek and Achaemenid construction. The question mark in the title is the argument. Cited on the one page in this corpus where what is disputed is not the polity's dates or its institutions but whether it was a polity.
2 citations · 2 chaptersAusten Henry Layard, Nineveh and its Remains (John Murray, 1849)
layard-1849The account of the excavations at Nimrud and Nineveh by the man who dug them, written for a general audience and enormously popular in its day. It is a period piece about the Ottoman provinces as much as an archaeological report, and its value here is that it records what the Assyrian capitals looked like before anybody knew what they were. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersW. E. H. Lecky, A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, in 5 vols (1892)
lecky-1892The standard older narrative of Penal-era and eighteenth-century Ireland; volume 1 covers the Treaty of Limerick's actual terms and its violation by the Penal Laws that followed. Open access via archive.org.
2 citations · 1 chapterThomas W. Lentz and Glenn D. Lowry, Timur and the Princely Vision: Persian Art and Culture in the Fifteenth Century (Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1989)
lentz-lowry-1989The exhibition catalogue that is still the standard treatment of Timurid art as a court programme rather than as a collection of objects. Cited because this site had been asserting that the Herat and Samarkand workshops set the standard three later empires worked from, on the authority of a political biography.
2 citations · 2 chaptersDuarte Lopes (Filippo Pigafetta, comp.), trans. Margarite Hutchinson, A Report of the Kingdom of Congo, and of the Surrounding Countries (John Murray, 1881)
lopes-pigafetta-1881An English translation of Pigafetta's 1591 "Relatione del Reame di Congo," itself compiled from the reports of Duarte Lopes, a Portuguese merchant who lived at the Kongo court and served as its ambassador to Rome in the 1580s. Drawing on court tradition transmitted through Lopes, it gives the fullest surviving narrative of Diogo Cão's 1480s landing, Gonçalo de Sousa's 1490 embassy, the 1491 conversion and baptism of King João I (Nzinga a Nkuwu) and the Mani Sogno, and the succession war between João's sons Afonso and Mpanzu a Kitima (rendered "Pango") that followed João's death - the earliest and most detailed account of that war, told in the devotional register of a source written to promote the Christian kingdom to a European audience, and read here with that framing made explicit rather than repeated as fact. Open access via archive.org.
2 citations · 1 chapterCharles James Lyall, Translations of Ancient Arabian Poetry, Chiefly Pre-Islamic (Williams and Norgate, 1885)
lyall-1885A scholarly selection of pre-Islamic odes with an introduction on how the poetry reached us: the institution of the rawi, the eighth-century collectors, and the specific grounds for doubting some of what they transmitted. Cited here for the transmission rather than for the verse. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersChristopher MacEvitt, The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance, in The Middle Ages Series (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)
macevitt-2008Argues that the Frankish states governed populations that were mostly Eastern Christian rather than Muslim, and that the arrangement they arrived at was neither the persecution of the older accounts nor convivencia but an unarticulated practical accommodation. Edessa is the central case, which is why this site cites it there rather than on the Jerusalem page.
2 citations · 1 chapterColin Mackerras, The Uighur Empire According to the T'ang Dynastic Histories: A Study in Sino-Uighur Relations, 744-840 (University of South Carolina Press, 1972)
mackerras-1972-uighur-empireA study built from the Uyghur chapters of the Old and New Tang Histories, with the reign-by-reign succession the Chinese court tracked because it had to. Cited for the khagans between Bögü's 779 assassination and the 830s crisis - the Ediz-clan restoration under Kutlugh in 795, Bai Qaghan's reign to 808, and Chongde Qaghan's 821 accession and marriage to Princess Taihe - a stretch this record's own peak-era chapter does not otherwise narrate.
2 citations · 1 chapterJ. P. Mahaffy, The Empire of the Ptolemies (Macmillan, 1895)
mahaffy-1895A continuous narrative of the dynasty drawing on Polybius, Josephus, Justin and the papyri known by the 1890s; covers in detail the 168-80 BC civil-war century - Ptolemy VI Philometor's captivity under Antiochus IV and joint rule with Euergetes II "Physcon," Physcon's murder and dismemberment of his own son Memphites, the bequest of Cyrenaica to Rome by Ptolemy Apion, and Ptolemy XI's murder of Berenice III and his own lynching by the Alexandrian mob nineteen days later. Open access via archive.org.
2 citations · 1 chapterJ. G. Manning, The Last Pharaohs: Egypt Under the Ptolemies, 305-30 BC (Princeton University Press, 2010)
manning-2010Reads the Ptolemaic state as a state rather than as a Greek episode in Egyptian history or an Egyptian episode in Greek history. Its argument — "bargained incorporation", a political economy negotiated between the ruler and the constituencies who could withhold cooperation, and a dynasty that ruled through Egyptian society rather than over it — is what this site's institutions fields for the polity are coded from.
2 citations · 1 chapteral-Masudi, Les Prairies d'or, volume II (Imprimerie Impériale, Paris, 1863)
masudi-meynardA Baghdadi geographer and traveller writing in 943, in the French translation printed with the Arabic. His chapter on the Caucasus and the Caspian is the fullest contemporary description of the Khazar state there is: the capital, the confessional courts, the Muslim guard and the terms of its service. He did not go to Atil himself and says where he is reporting rather than observing; he is also a compiler who prints what he was told and leaves inconsistencies standing. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersMatthew of Edessa, Chronicle (2017)
matthew-of-edessaA contemporary Armenian priest's chronicle of the Edessa region and Cilicia, covering the Rubenid succession from Kostandin through Toros I to Levon I, and the emperor John II Komnenos's 1137 siege of Anazarbus and capture of Levon and his family, ending its continuous narrative around 1162. Bedrosian's translation is explicitly released into the public domain.
2 citations · 1 chapterWilliam Frederick Mayers, The Chinese Reader's Manual (American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1874)
mayers-1874A biographical and bibliographical dictionary of Chinese history and literature. Cited here for its entries on Yue Fei and Qin Hui - a named account of Yue Fei's campaigns, his 1136 request denied on Qin Hui's advice, the treason charge, and his 1141 execution, which the general narrative histories in this collection's other China sources leave unnamed. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 1 chapterJuan González de Mendoza, The History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China and the Situation Thereof (Hakluyt Society, 1853)
mendoza-1588An Augustinian friar compiled the first substantial European account of Ming China without ever going there himself, working from the reports of the Spanish embassy of Martín de Rada, who spent two months in Fujian in 1575 with official escorts, visited its schools, prisons and a provincial graduation ceremony, and brought back a chest of printed Chinese books. Mendoza wrote it up in 1585; this is the 1588 English translation as reprinted by the Hakluyt Society, with the editor's introduction that supplies the earlier eyewitness of Galeote Pereira alongside it. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersPiotr Michalowski, The Correspondence of the Kings of Ur: An Epistolary History of an Ancient Mesopotamian Kingdom, in Mesopotamian Civilizations 15 (Eisenbrauns, 2011)
michalowski-2011The letters between the kings of Ur and their officials, collated across more than a hundred manuscripts. Cited here for the last years of the dynasty, which these letters describe from inside as they are happening, and for the standing warning Michalowski attaches to them: they survive as school copies, and a school copy of a royal letter is a literary object before it is a document.
2 citations · 1 chapterG. Mollat (trans. Janet Love), The Popes at Avignon, 1305-1378 (Harper & Row (Harper Torchbooks), 1963)
mollat-1963Covers Clement V's 1309 move of the papal court to Avignon - driven by the trial of the Templars and Philip the Fair's own pressure rather than any single dramatic break with Rome - and the failed attempts by Urban V and Gregory XI to return, ending with Gregory XI's own death in Rome in 1378 on the eve of the Great Schism. Open access via archive.org (Digital Library of India scan).
2 citations · 1 chapterLady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e, Written During Her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa (Thomas Martin, London, 1790)
montagu-lettersLetters written in 1716-18, when the author accompanied her husband on his embassy to Ahmed III, and published after her death. She learned some Turkish, got into houses and conversations no male traveller could reach, and was contemptuous of the travel writing of her contemporaries, which makes her both unusually well informed and unusually keen to correct somebody. Used here for her account of the balance of power between sultan, soldiery and religious establishment, and for the smallpox inoculation she watched and carried home. She was a guest of the state she is describing and saw its capital, not its provinces.
2 citations · 2 chaptersAdolphe de Calassanti-Motylinski, Chronique d'Ibn Saghir sur les imams rostemides de Tahert (1907)
motylinski-1907A French edition and translation, with the Arabic text facing, of Ibn al-Saghir's own early-tenth-century chronicle of the Rustamid imams - written by a contemporary at Tahert itself. Covers, among the imams, Aflah ibn Abd al-Wahhab's fifty- or sixty-year reign - the longest of the dynasty - his own character and governance, and the succession dispute after his death. Open access via archive.org.
2 citations · 1 chapterJames Murdoch, in collaboration with Isoh Yamagata, A History of Japan During the Century of Early Foreign Intercourse (1542-1651) (Kobe, Japan: Office of the Chronicle, 1903)
murdoch-1903Volume II of Murdoch's history, covering Hideyoshi and the early Tokugawa. Used here for Hideyoshi's domestic policy - the 1586-1596 land survey and the sword-hunt disarmament edict, including a contemporary letter from the Jesuit missionary Luís Fróis describing the latter's actual mechanism. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 1 chapterA. F. Murison, Sir William Wallace, in Famous Scots Series (1900)
murison-1900A narrative biography of William Wallace and the opening of the Wars of Scottish Independence. Open access via archive.org and Project Gutenberg.
2 citations · 1 chapterReynold A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (T. Fisher Unwin, 1907)
nicholson-1907Covers the early, otherwise obscure Nasrid kings between the founder and al-Mundhir III: Nu'man I "al-A'war," legendary builder of the castle of Khawarnaq and, in the story that grew up around Adi ibn Zayd's poem, the king who abandoned his throne to become a wandering ascetic after his own vizier's answer to a question about permanence; and Mundhir I, who forced Bahram Gor's succession to the Sasanian throne and was defeated fighting for Persia against Rome in 421. Open access via archive.org.
2 citations · 1 chapterTadhg Ó Cianáin (ed. and trans. Paul Walsh), The Flight of the Earls (1916)
ocianain-1916An eyewitness account by a member of the party that accompanied Hugh O'Neill and Rory O'Donnell into exile in 1607, covering their departure from Lough Swilly and journey to the Continent. Open access via archive.org.
2 citations · 1 chapterD. T. Niane (ed.), General History of Africa, Volume IV: Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century (UNESCO Publishing / Heinemann, 1984)
ogot-1984-vol4The UNESCO volume covering Mali's own imperial centuries in depth, drawing on Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Battuta alongside Delafosse's reign-by-reign chronology. Cited here for the succession after Mansa Sulayman's death - his son Fomba's brief reign, Mari Diata II's ruinous one, and Mansa Musa III's reign under a general's real control - the stretch between Ibn Battuta's 1352-53 visit and Timbuktu's loss to the Tuareg in 1433 that this site's other Mali sources do not narrate in detail. Open access via archive.org.
2 citations · 1 chapterDe Lacy O'Leary, A Short History of the Fatimid Khalifate (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1923)
oleary-1923Covers, in the course of narrating Caliph al-Hakim's reign, the c. 1010-13 episode in which the Sharif of Mecca, Husayn ibn Ja'far, was proclaimed rival caliph by Bedouin rebels in Palestine and then abandoned by them, ending in his own reconciliation with Hakim. Open access via archive.org.
2 citations · 1 chapterBartolomeo Pacca (trans.), Historical Memoirs of Cardinal Pacca, Prime Minister to Pius VII (1850)
pacca-1850An eyewitness memoir by Pius VII's own Secretary of State, covering the 1809 bull of excommunication against Napoleon's aggression and the escalade and abduction of the Pope from the Quirinal Palace that followed weeks later, told from inside the room. Open access via archive.org.
2 citations · 1 chapterAnonymous, The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: Travel and Trade in the Indian Ocean by a Merchant of the First Century (Longmans, Green, 1912)
periplus-schoffA working sailing handbook written in Greek in the middle of the first century AD by somebody who had made the voyages, listing the ports of the Red Sea, the East African coast, South Arabia and India with what could be bought and sold at each and who governed them. It is not a history and has no interest in being one, which is what makes it useful: it names the rulers of South Arabia in passing, as facts a merchant needed, at a moment no other outside source describes. Schoff's translation and notes are of their period and the notes are freer with speculation than the text. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersProcopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars, Books V-VIII: The Gothic War (Loeb Classical Library, 1919)
procopius-gothicThe companion to the Vandalic War and by far the longer book: four volumes on the reconquest of Italy, from the landing in Sicily in 535 to the destruction of the Gothic army in 552. Procopius was Belisarius's secretary and was inside Rome for the siege of 537-38, which is the most detailed account of a siege to survive from antiquity, down to the arrangement of the floating mills. He is at his least reliable when explaining why Justinian did things and at his best describing what he watched. The later books, written after he had turned against the regime, treat Totila with a respect he gives almost nobody on his own side. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersThomas Stamford Raffles, The History of Java (Black, Parbury and Allen, 1817)
raffles-1817Written by the Lieutenant-Governor who had just administered Java for the British, and to be read as such: the account of a province's disorder is also the case for the government that came in to settle it. Cited here for the Banten of 1808 to 1813, which Raffles describes at first hand and with figures, including the pension for which the last sultan gave up the administration of the country.
2 citations · 2 chaptersAbd. Rahman, Indigenous Populations, Plantations, and Agrarian Conflicts in Rural North Maluku during the Colonial Period from the 17th to the 20th Century (IHiS (Indonesian Historical Studies) 8 (1), 1-25, 2024)
rahman-2024Cited for the 1910 "korte verklaring" that stripped the sultans of Ternate, Tidore and Bacan of their personal land rights (aha kolano), the early-1900s Halmahera uprisings against continued Dutch monopoly control (Jailolo 1876, Kao 1904, Loloda 1906-1909, Galela 1906-1907, Jailolo 1914), and the 1998 and 2006 land disputes over the Ternate sultanate's former holdings after Suharto's fall. Open access.
2 citations · 2 chaptersW. M. Ramsay, The Historical Geography of Asia Minor (John Murray, for the Royal Geographical Society, 1890)
ramsay-1890An attempt to fix the sites of every ancient city in Anatolia against the roads, the bishopric lists and the ground, by a man who had walked a great deal of it. His identifications have been revised in many places. What does not date is the incidental observation — which villages had which names in whose mouths in the 1880s — because he was recording it while it was still there to record. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersThe Visigothic Code (Forum Judicum), The Visigothic Code (Forum Judicum) (Boston Book Company, 1910)
scott-1910The Visigothic law in English, with a preface by its translator. Scott is an enthusiast whose admiration for his subject runs well past the evidence, and his rhapsodies about the Code's influence on all modern systems of government should be discounted heavily. His concrete statements about where and when the laws were still being applied are another matter, and are what is used here. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersLewis Sergeant, The Franks, in The Story of the Nations (T. Fisher Unwin, 1898)
sergeant-1898A connective narrative history spanning the whole Merovingian and early Carolingian period in one continuous account; cited here for its rendering, from Gregory of Tours, of Clovis's battle-vow before Tolbiac and his conversion. An older popular work rather than a modern academic monograph, used only where it draws directly and traceably on a named primary source. Public domain, open access via archive.org.
2 citationsPeter Somogyi, New Remarks on the Flow of Byzantine Coins in Avaria and Walachia during the Second Half of the Seventh Century (in Florin Curta and Roman Kovalev, eds., The Other Europe in the Middle Ages: Avars, Bulgars, Khazars and Cumans) (Brill, 2008)
somogyi-2008A numismatic study of Byzantine coin finds in the former Avar khaganate, used here for the century and a half between the 626 siege of Constantinople and Charlemagne's first campaigns against the Avars, a period the author himself describes as one about which "we know very little." Cited for the abrupt disappearance of Byzantine gold from Avar territory after 626, coinciding with the end of the tribute payments the siege had been fought over; the equally abrupt reappearance of Byzantine coin after about 650, read as evidence of renewed Avar-Byzantine relations; the migration into Avar territory, following the death of the Onogur Bulgar ruler Kuvrat in the 650s or 660s, of one of his sons and his followers, reinforcing Avar numbers after the collapse of Kuvrat's own Bulgar polity; and the Avar embassy that reached Constantinople in 678 to congratulate Emperor Constantine IV on his victory over the Arabs, the clearest single point of contact between the khaganate and the empire in this period. A modern copyrighted academic volume, not a public-domain text, but the only accessible source found addressing this stretch of Avar history in any detail.
2 citations · 1 chapterMuhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, Volume XXI: The Victory of the Marwanids (State University of New York Press, 1990)
tabari-21-fishbeinAnnotated translation of the year-by-year chronicle for 66-73/685-693, built from named ninth-century transmitters — chiefly al-Waqidi's informants — quoting participants and witnesses rather than summarising them. Used here for the siege of Mecca and the last day of Ibn al-Zubayr: the farewell to his mother Asma, his death on the field, and the display of his head, all given as direct reported speech from people who said they were there. Tabari preserves competing versions without choosing between them, which the notes make explicit.
2 citations · 1 chapterAbd al-Rahman al-Sadi, Tarikh es-Soudan (Ernest Leroux, Paris, 1900)
tarikh-es-soudan-houdasA Timbuktu chronicle finished about 1655 by a man who held office under the Moroccan pashalik and whose family lived through its arrival. For the Songhai empire and the Moroccan conquest of 1591 it is the central source and a local one: al-Sadi is writing about the destruction of his own city's world by a government he then worked for, which shows in what he chooses to record and in what he declines to say plainly. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersBaki Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World, in Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
tezcan-2010Argues against the decline narrative: that the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a socio-economic transformation producing a second, differently constituted state rather than the beginning of a long failure. Cited for the chapter on that period, which this site would otherwise have had to write in the vocabulary of decline by default.
2 citations · 1 chapterGeorge McCall Theal, Records of South-Eastern Africa, volume VI (Government of the Cape Colony, 1900)
theal-records-viA nine-volume collection of Portuguese and Dutch documents on the region, translated and printed for the Cape government; volume VI opens with the extracts from Joao de Barros's Da Asia that contain the earliest written description of a zimbabwe, published in 1552 from reports Barros never saw himself. Theal is a colonial historiographer of the 1890s and his own commentary carries the assumptions of that office, which is a reason to use the documents he printed rather than the frame he printed them in. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersTheophanes the Confessor, The Chronicle of Theophanes: An English Translation of anni mundi 6095-6305 (A.D. 602-813) (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982)
theophanes-turtledove-1982A Byzantine monastic chronicle finished around 814, year by year from the Byzantine side of every Khazar contact the empire had in this period - never naming a khagan personally, which the chronicle itself makes plain is simply how Constantinople recorded them, but dating and narrating the events in detail regardless. Cited for the Justinian II episode, 695-711.
2 citations · 1 chapterGeoffrey of Villehardouin, Chronicle of the Fourth Crusade and the Conquest of Constantinople, in Memoirs of the Crusades (J. M. Dent, Everyman's Library, 1908)
villehardouin-marzialsThe marshal of Champagne was one of the six envoys who negotiated the transport contract with Venice in 1201, and he wrote the crusade up afterwards in the third person. He is therefore the participant with the strongest interest in the outcome looking defensible: the diversions to Zara and Constantinople are presented throughout as things that had to be done, and the men who left the army rather than take part are consistently described as deserters. What he cannot hide, because he is proud of it, is the arithmetic — he records the terms of the contract, the numbers who failed to arrive, and what Venice was owed. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersMuhammad ibn Umar al-Waqidi, The Life of Muhammad: al-Waqidi's Kitab al-Maghazi (Routledge, 2011)
waqidi-maghaziThe earliest surviving dedicated account of the Medinan campaigns, compiled in the late eighth century and much fuller on the expeditions than the biographical tradition it sits beside. Used here for the negotiation at al-Hudaybiyya, which it reports at length and with the arguments over wording intact.
2 citations · 1 chapterW. A. Wigram, An Introduction to the History of the Assyrian Church, or The Church of the Sassanid Persian Empire, 100-640 A.D. (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1910)
wigram-1910The standard English narrative of the Church of the East for a long generation, and it has to be read with two things in front of you. Wigram was an Anglican missionary to the Assyrians and writes as an advocate; and for the early centuries his principal authority is Mshikha-Zkha's History of the Bishops of Adiabene, a sixth-century compilation whose authenticity has been seriously disputed since. He accepts it more readily than a modern reader should. Cited here for what that tradition contains — the bishops of Arbela, who persecuted them and on whose authority, and the position of Adiabene as a refuge for Christians from the Roman side — with the provenance stated in the chapter. Out of copyright.
2 citations · 1 chapterPatrick Ryan Williams, Cerro Baúl: A Wari Center on the Tiwanaku Frontier, in Latin American Antiquity, vol. 12, no. 1 (2001)
williams-2001Excavation report and radiocarbon dating from Cerro Baúl in the Moquegua Valley, the one site known to have been occupied by both Wari and Tiwanaku at once - used here for its finding that the two states shared the valley for roughly the last three centuries of the Middle Horizon with no evidence of violence between them, revising the older assumption that Tiwanaku simply preceded and dominated Wari. Open access via a mirrored scan of the original journal pages.
2 citations · 1 chapterFrancisco de Xerez, trans. Clements Markham, Reports on the Discovery of Peru, in Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society (Hakluyt Society, 1872)
xerez-1872An eyewitness account by Pizarro's own secretary, written within a year or two of the events - the ambush at Cajamarca in November 1532, Friar Vicente de Valverde's confrontation with Atahualpa and the seizure of the Inca by Pizarro himself, and the ransom that followed. Ends before Atahualpa's 1533 execution, which Xerez had already left Peru by the time it happened. Public domain, open access via archive.org.
2 citations · 1 chapterZosimus, The History of Count Zosimus (Printed for J. Davis, 1814)
zosimus-1814A pagan Greek official of the imperial treasury writing about 500, whose declared purpose is the reverse of Polybius's: Polybius showed how Rome gained an empire in fifty-three years, and Zosimus means to show how it lost one. He blames the abandonment of the old rites and reads omens into everything, which is worth knowing before using him. What he preserves, including a circumstantial account of Aurelian's Palmyrene campaign that exists nowhere else in this form, is better than his explanations of it. This anonymous 1814 English translation is out of copyright.
2 citations · 2 chaptersAfonso de Albuquerque the younger, The Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque, Second Viceroy of India, Part IV (Hakluyt Society, 1884)
albuquerque-birchThe commander's own son compiled these from his father's papers, and they are a defence of him as much as a record. What they are unusually good at is the texture of an operation going wrong: the failed assault on Aden in 1513 is described in detail the author had no motive to invent, down to whose ladders broke and why. Read for the mechanics rather than the judgements, which are those of a man arguing his father's case against the Portuguese court. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterA. S. Altekar, The Rashtrakutas and Their Times (Oriental Book Agency, 1934)
altekar-1934The standard dedicated monograph on the Rashtrakuta dynasty by the same historian who later wrote the Rashtrakuta chapter in yazdani-1960. Cited here for two Arab travelers' direct testimony on the dynasty's own reputation: the merchant Sulaiman's judgment, writing around 850, that the Rashtrakuta king - called the Balhara, a rendering of the royal title Vallabha - was owed homage by every neighbouring prince "though master in his own state," a verdict Altekar calls "no flattery, but a mere statement of facts"; and Al-Masudi's own description of the same king's army, "innumerable" in horses and elephants. Openly accessible via archive.org.
1 citation · 1 chapterEllis Ashmead-Bartlett, With the Turks in Thrace (George H. Doran Company, New York, 1913)
ashmead-bartlett-1913The Daily Telegraph's special correspondent, accredited to Abdullah Pasha's army and present at Lüleburgaz and through the retreat to the Çatalca lines, written with his brother Seabury. He is candid about his own running war with Ottoman press censorship and about the army's collapse alike, and the retreat chapters are eyewitness reporting rather than reconstruction after the fact: he marched in the column. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterAthenaeus of Naucratis, The Deipnosophists, or Banquet of the Learned, Volume I (Henry G. Bohn, 1854)
athenaeus-yongeA rambling third-century dinner-table compilation whose value is almost entirely that of a quarry: Athenaeus quotes hundreds of lost books at length, and several survive only in him. Book V preserves a long extract from Kallixeinos of Rhodes describing the grand procession of Ptolemy II at Alexandria, item by item, down to the weight of the spices and the cost of the crowns. It is a description of a display, written to impress, copied by a man collecting curiosities — and it is the only account of the occasion there is. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterAnonymous (Syriac), attributed to a companion of Rabban Sauma, The Monks of Kublai Khan, Emperor of China (Religious Tract Society, 1928)
barsauma-budgeA Syriac life of two Nestorian monks of Khanbaliq, Rabban Sauma and Markos, who set out around 1275 to walk to Jerusalem and never arrived: war blocked the road west of Baghdad, Markos was made Patriarch of the Church of the East as Mar Yahballaha III, and Sauma was later sent by the Ilkhan Arghun as an ambassador to the courts of Rome, Paris and England. Budge's translation covers both journeys; cited here for the outward leg, which is an eyewitness crossing of the Yuan's own western frontier during the war with Qaidu. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterJ. Theodore Bent, The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland: Being a Record of Excavation and Exploration in 1891 (Longmans, Green, 1895)
bent-mashonaland-1895The first archaeological account of Great Zimbabwe, by an English traveller sent out under the auspices of the British South Africa Company in the year after the Company occupied the country. Bent dug carefully, surveyed accurately with the help of R. M. W. Swan, and published plans and finds that are still consulted. He also concluded that the builders were Arabians and that no African could have built it, and set out the reasoning by which he got there — which is why the book is read now: it is the clearest surviving statement of how the foreign-origin theory was assembled, written by the man assembling it. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterLady Anne Blunt, A Pilgrimage to Nejd, the Cradle of the Arab Race (John Murray, 1881)
blunt-1881Lady Anne and Wilfrid Blunt crossed the Nafud to Ha'il in the winter of 1878-79 and stayed as guests of Muhammad ibn Rashid at the height of his power. They had gone to buy mares. She keeps the journal, records what people told her rather than what she concluded, and is explicit where the local account contradicts Palgrave's. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterHoratio F. Brown, Venice: An Historical Sketch of the Republic (1893)
brown-1893Covers the 1080s war against Robert Guiscard's Normans at Durazzo and Corfu, Doge Domenico Selvo's deposition after the first defeat, and the 1082 Golden Bull by which Alexios I rewarded Venetian naval help with customs exemption and a merchant quarter in Constantinople. Open access via archive.org.
1 citation · 1 chapterEdward G. Browne, The Persian Revolution of 1905-1909 (Cambridge University Press, 1910)
browne-1910The standard English account of the Constitutional Revolution for most of a century, written by the Cambridge professor of Persian while the events were still going on, by a man who was simultaneously campaigning in England on behalf of the constitutionalists and against the Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907. He declines to call it a history, says in the preface that his purpose is to arouse sympathy for the Persians, and prints the constitutional documents in full as appendices so that a reader can check him. Cited here as a partisan source that declares itself. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterJames Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire (Macmillan, 1889)
bryce-1889Written as a prize essay in 1862 and expanded over forty years, with a supplementary chapter on the German empire of 1871 added while that empire was new. Bryce's constitutional judgements have been overtaken and his certainty that the medieval empire's failure was its failure to become a nation is exactly the reading later historians set out to overturn; he is used here for what he saw and reported, and his 1871 chapter is itself a piece of the story rather than an account of it. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterJohn Lewis Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahábys, Collected During His Travels in the East (Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830)
burckhardt-1830Published posthumously from the notebooks of a Swiss traveller who spent years in Arabia in Muslim dress and reached Mecca and Medina, gathering material on the Wahhabi state while it still existed and while the Egyptian war against it was being fought. He never got to the Najd, so the Diriyah material is second-hand — but it is collected from people who had been there, at the time, by somebody with no interest in the outcome, and it records the tax rates and the libraries as readily as the wars. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterOgier Ghiselin de Busbecq, The Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (C. Kegan Paul, 1881)
busbecq-forsterThe Habsburg ambassador at Suleyman's court from 1555 to 1562, writing four long letters home to a friend. He was there to negotiate over Hungary, he was often effectively under house arrest, and he used the time to describe the Ottoman army, the court and the succession with an attention nobody in Europe had matched. He is an enemy diplomat and he says so; the peculiar value of the letters is that everything admiring in them is admiration extracted from a man who expected to be beaten by what he was watching. Forster and Daniell's translation is Victorian and readable. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterDemetrius Cantemir, The History of the Growth and Decay of the Othman Empire (James, John and Paul Knapton, 1756)
cantemir-1756A Moldavian prince who spent some twenty years in Istanbul as a hostage and a client, knew Turkish, Persian and Arabic, sat in on the politics he describes and then defected to Peter the Great, writing the book in exile. It is where the two-part periodization of Ottoman history — growth, then decay from the later seventeenth century — enters European writing, and that framing is itself a claim to be weighed rather than a fact. He names informants, including his own father, and reports court explanations he cannot have witnessed. The scan used here is the English edition; its spelling is eighteenth-century and its typography uses the long s.
1 citation · 1 chapterPietro Casola, Canon Pietro Casola's Pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the Year 1494 (Manchester University Press, 1907)
casola-newettA Milanese canon in his sixties who went to Jerusalem on a Venetian pilgrim galley and kept a diary of everything, including the five weeks he spent in Venice waiting for it to sail. He is precise, a compulsive comparer of other cities with his own, and entirely uninterested in politics, which is what makes the account useful: he describes the warehouses, the vegetable boats and the shops because he wants to say how much there was of everything. Newett's introduction and notes on the galley trade are substantial and separately valuable. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterMiguel de Castanhoso and João Bermudes, The Portuguese Expedition to Abyssinia in 1541-1543 (Hakluyt Society, 1902)
castanhoso-whitewayTwo accounts of the same campaign by men who were on it, printed together. Castanhoso was a soldier in Cristóvão da Gama's four hundred and wrote a plain military narrative; Bermudes claimed to be patriarch of Ethiopia, was probably not, and wrote a self-serving one. Whiteway prints both, sets the Ethiopian and Arabic accounts against them at the end of each chapter, and is unsparing about Bermudes. Between them they are the only eyewitness description of the war that decided whether the Ethiopian highlands stayed Christian. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterPedro Chalmeta Gendrón, ¿Asturias, Covadonga, Pelayo?, in Aragón en la Edad Media, vol. 33 (2022)
chalmeta-2022A critical reassessment of the Covadonga/Pelayo founding narrative, noting that the only genuinely contemporary source, the Chronicle of 754, says nothing at all about an Asturian uprising despite discussing events far more distant from its own vantage point - the later chronicle tradition's silence-filling is treated as legend-building rather than history. Open access via the Universidad de Zaragoza's journal repository.
1 citation · 1 chapterCentral Intelligence Agency, Office of Current Intelligence, Current Intelligence Memorandum: The Situation in Yemen (1963)
cia-1963-yemenA four-page assessment written on 9 September 1963, declassified and released through the CIA's reading room. It is a working memorandum for American policymakers rather than a history: it says what the analysts thought was happening in the first year of the civil war, including where they were relying on UN estimates they doubted. Its judgements are those of a party with an interest in the outcome and its figures are estimates it labels as such. Cited for what the war looked like from outside while it was going on. A United States government work, in the public domain.
1 citation · 1 chapterA. W. Ward and G. W. Prothero (eds.), The Cambridge Modern History, Volume X: The Restoration (1907)
cmh-vol10-1907The Restoration-era volume of the multi-author Cambridge Modern History, planned by Lord Acton. The two chapters drawn on here, "The Doctrinaires" and "Reaction and Revolution in France," are both by Émile Bourgeois, professor at the University of Paris, and cover the 1814-1815 Bourbon restoration through the July Ordinances and the 1830 insurrection that ended it; a later chapter of his own, "The Orleans Monarchy," covers the Duchess of Berry's 1832 Legitimist rising on behalf of her son. Open access via archive.org, digitised from a Digital Library of India / Archaeological Survey of India scan.
1 citation · 1 chapterCosmas Indicopleustes, The Christian Topography of Cosmas, an Egyptian Monk (Hakluyt Society, 1897)
cosmas-mccrindleAn Alexandrian merchant who traded in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean in the 520s, became a monk, and wrote a book arguing that the earth is a flat rectangle shaped like the Tabernacle. The cosmology is why nobody read him for centuries and the digressions are why he matters: to prove points about the reach of Christianity he describes the places he had been, including Adulis and the gold trade of the Aksumite kingdom, and he copies out two Greek inscriptions he was asked to transcribe there. He is credulous, and he is reporting the Sasu gold trade at second hand from the traders who made the journey. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterMovses Dasxuranci, The History of the Caucasian Albanians (Oxford University Press, 1961)
dasxuranci-dowsettThe only surviving history of Caucasian Albania, written in Armenian and compiled in stages between the seventh and the tenth centuries. It is the source for almost everything known about the Mihranid princes, and its third book carries the events the country's own literature stops at: the murder of the last Mihranid, the transfer of the principality to the Eranshahik house, the raid on Partaw. Dowsett's edition prints the variant readings and the chronological disputes rather than smoothing them.
1 citationDixon Denham, Hugh Clapperton and Walter Oudney, Narrative of Travels and Discoveries in Northern and Central Africa, in the Years 1822, 1823, and 1824 (John Murray, 1826)
denham-clapperton-1826The British mission that crossed the Sahara from Tripoli and reached Lake Chad, the first Europeans to describe Bornu at first hand. Denham wrote the Bornu sections and is a careful observer of things he can count — cavalry, armour, the layout of a town — and a contemptuous one about everything else: he arrives expecting to find either an army or a few naked slaves, and his surprise at finding the first is on the page. The party travelled with a Tripolitan slave-raiding expedition and Denham accompanied it, which he reports. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterRichard of Devizes, Chronicle of the Deeds of King Richard the First, in Chronicles of the Crusades (Henry G. Bohn, 1848)
devizes-gilesA monk of Winchester writing within a few years of the events, hostile to almost everybody and funny about it. He is used here for the winter of 1190-91, when the armies of England and France stopped in Sicily on their way to the Third Crusade and one of them sacked Messina. He is entirely on Richard's side, reports the king's speeches as though he had been present, and records the insults the Sicilians threw at the English because he thinks they prove his case. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterCharles M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, Volume II (Cambridge University Press, 1888)
doughty-1888Two years in northern Arabia between 1876 and 1878 by an Englishman who would not conceal that he was a Christian, written up in a deliberately archaic English that has kept the book famous and hard to read. He spent months at Ha'il as a guest of the Rashidi amir and was eventually sent away. He is exact about physical things — how a house is built, how many wards a town has, what is and is not paid for out of public funds — and he records his own humiliations as carefully as anything else, which makes him unusually checkable for a traveller. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterElishe, The History of Vartan and of the Battle of the Armenians, Containing an Account of the Religious Wars between the Persians and Armenians (Oriental Translation Fund, 1830)
elishe-neumannThe Armenian account of the war of 450-451 and of the battle of Avarayr, written within living memory of it by a man who presents himself as present, and the foundational text of Armenian national memory — the speeches in it are still quoted. It is a martyrdom narrative and shapes everything to that end, but it is exact where it matters: it names the noble houses that fought, counts the dead of each one, and gives the casualty figures for both sides. Neumann's notes argue with the text and with the parallel account of Lazar P'arpec'i. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterKhwandamir and others, The History of India, as Told by its Own Historians: The Muhammadan Period, Volume IV (Trübner, 1872)
elliot-dowson-4Translated extracts from Persian histories, assembled by two British officials who wanted the Indian material and took whatever came attached to it — which is why the volume carries long stretches of Khwandamir's *Habib al-Siyar* on Ghaznavid campaigns in Iran that nobody has since translated into English. The editors are working from manuscripts, note where their copies disagree, and say when a chronicler has omitted an episode his rivals record. The framing is imperial and the selection is made for a purpose, and the translations are of late compilers rather than contemporaries; but Khwandamir was working from earlier books, some of them lost, and for several of these decades this is the only English there is. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterFinbarr Barry Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval "Hindu-Muslim" Encounter (Princeton University Press, 2009)
flood-2009Reads the material culture of the eighth to thirteenth centuries in what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan and north India against the standard account of the period as unbroken hostility between two monolithic religious cultures. Cited for the Ghurid chapter on what the dynasty built, which is very nearly all it left.
1 citation · 1 chapterWilliam Francklin, Observations Made on a Tour from Bengal to Persia in the Years 1786-7 (Printed for T. Cadell, 1790)
francklin-1790An East India Company officer who spent eight months at Shiraz in 1787, living in a Persian household and learning the language, seven years after Karim Khan Zand's death and in the middle of the wars that followed it. He is a soldier and describes walls and ditches with a professional eye; he is also writing before the outcome was known, which is why his account of the Qajar escape from Shiraz is reported flatly rather than as the beginning of anything. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterRichard N. Frye, Bukhara: The Medieval Achievement, in The Centers of Civilization Series (University of Oklahoma Press, 1965)
frye-1965A short book about one city at its height, by the translator of Narshakhi's History of Bukhara. Cited for the Samanid capital as a place rather than as a seat of government: the agrarian base, the caravan trade, the bureaucracy and the literary culture that made the identity line on that page true.
1 citation · 1 chapterFrancis Aidan Gasquet, The Great Pestilence (A.D. 1348-9), Now Commonly Known as the Black Death (Simpkin Marshall, 1893)
gasquet-1893A Victorian monastic historian's account of the plague, valuable here for the long translated extracts from Gabriele de' Mussi, the Piacenza notary whose narrative is the source of the story that the disease entered Europe through the Genoese colony at Caffa. Gasquet calls de' Mussi an eyewitness in his text and then prints, in a footnote on the same page, the evidence that he was not — which is the kind of self-correction worth reading a nineteenth-century book for. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterHerbert A. Giles, Gems of Chinese Literature: Prose (Kelly & Walsh, 1923)
giles-gems-1923An anthology of translated Chinese prose from the Zhou dynasty to the nineteenth century, each piece given with a short biography of its author. Cited here for Li Si's memorial against the expulsion of foreign advisers from the Qin court, written before the unification and preserved because it worked: the Qin king who received it went on to become the First Emperor with Li Si still at his side. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterThe Glass Palace Chronicle of the Kings of Burma (Oxford University Press, 1923)
glass-palace-chronicleThe Burmese royal chronicle, compiled by a commission at Ava in 1829 out of earlier chronicles, in the standard English translation of the Pagan section. It is not a source for what happened at Pagan: it is a source for what the Burmese court in the nineteenth century understood to have happened, and the two are different in ways the chronicle itself sometimes admits — it quotes rival chronicles against each other and argues. Nagas hide infants, horses are demons, and a king emits a radiant wheel when he speaks. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterS. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (University of California Press, 1967)
goitein-1967Six volumes published between 1967 and 1993; cited by the first. Used for the Fatimid chapter on the Geniza, which is the one place in this corpus where a polity's ordinary economic life is documented by its own paper rather than reconstructed from chronicles written afterwards.
1 citation · 1 chapterPeter B. Golden (ed.), trans. Tibor Halasi-Kun and others, The King's Dictionary: The Rasulid Hexaglot — Fourteenth Century Vocabularies in Arabic, Persian, Turkic, Greek, Armenian and Mongol, in Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 8 (Brill, 2000)
golden-2000The edition of a six-language glossary compiled by a Rasulid sultan, with introductory essays by Golden and Thomas Allsen. Cited here for the object itself, which is a better piece of evidence about what fourteenth-century Aden was than any figure this site could print.
1 citation · 1 chapterGregory of Tours, The History of the Franks (Clarendon Press, 1927)
gregory-daltonThe complete text, where Brehaut's widely used edition is a selection that omits most of the Spanish material. Dalton's second volume carries the chapters on Leovigild's family, which Gregory followed closely because a Frankish princess had married into it and because the quarrel was about the faith he shared with her. He is a partisan, he is writing about Arians, and he reports miracles and divine vengeance in the same voice as troop movements; what he is not is late, since he was alive while it happened and talking to people who had come back from Toledo. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterGregory the Great, Selected Epistles, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Volumes XII-XIII (Christian Literature Company, 1895)
gregory-great-barmbySomething over eight hundred letters survive from the pope who governed Rome from 590 to 604, and they are the only substantial administrative archive from Italy in the century of the Lombard conquest. They are correspondence rather than history: Gregory writing to generals, exarchs, bishops and the emperor about grain, ransoms, hostages, unpaid soldiers and the terms of a truce, in the ordinary irritable voice of a man doing a job. He detests the Lombards and says so constantly, which has to be allowed for. Barmby's Victorian translation is a selection and his notes are partisan in the other direction. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterHans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus the Vagabond (William Heinemann, 1912)
grimmelshausen-goodrickA picaresque novel published in 1668 by a man who had been swept into the Thirty Years' War as a boy and spent most of it in and around armies. It is fiction, and it is satire, and it is also the only sustained account of that war written from inside it by someone who was not an officer, a diplomat or a chronicler. The famous passages — the sack of the farm, the tree of war — are set pieces built for effect and should be read as such; what they are evidence of is what a survivor thought the war had been like. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterDimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early 'Abbasid Society (Routledge, 1998)
gutas-1998The standard account, and used here for its argument rather than for its booklist: that the translation movement was a state-sponsored social phenomenon serving Abbasid ideological needs, sustained for two centuries by demand and patronage, rather than the work of a few enlightened individuals or of Christian translators acting alone.
1 citation · 1 chapterThe Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation (George Bishop, Ralph Newberie and Robert Barker, London, 1600)
hakluyt-navigationsAn English clergyman spent his life collecting the papers of English voyages — logs, letters, ambassadors' reports, cargo lists, patents — and printed them with almost no editing, which is exactly what makes the collection useful four centuries later. The documents are written by the participants for their employers rather than for readers, so they record prices, quantities and slights. Hakluyt had a purpose in publishing: he wanted England in the trades Spain and Portugal held, and the collection is arranged to make that case. Used here for the Barbary embassies, where the English ambassadors report their own receptions at Marrakesh in detail because the reception was the point of the mission. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterSir Charles Harington, Tim Harington Looks Back (John Murray, London, 1940)
harington-1940The memoir of the general who commanded the Allied occupation forces at Constantinople from October 1920 — already present in this record as the man Mehmed VI appealed to for protection in November 1922. Used here for the Chanak crisis and the Mudania conference of October 1922, which Harington negotiated directly with İsmet Pasha and which forced the Allies to deal with the Ankara government as the authority in Turkey, three weeks before the Grand National Assembly abolished the sultanate. A participant's account, written eighteen years after the fact from his own papers, and unapologetically pleased with his own conduct of it. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterBernard Haykel, Revival and Reform in Islam: The Legacy of Muhammad al-Shawkani, in Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
haykel-2003An intellectual biography and an account of how a society dominated by Zaydi Shi'ism was reoriented towards Sunni reformism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and how that reorientation served the imamate's own political needs. Cited for the tension this site's Zaydi record kept naming without a source for it: an office open to any qualified Alid that had become hereditary in one house.
1 citation · 1 chapterMartin Hinds, The Murder of the Caliph 'Uthman, in International Journal of Middle East Studies 3(4), 450-469 (1972)
hinds-1972Used for Uthman's caliphate, which this site previously recorded only as a corpse. Hinds reads the killing as the outcome of a distributional quarrel — fiscal centralisation over the conquered crown lands, Umayyad kinsmen in the governorships, and precedence in Islam used as a claim on stipend rank — rather than as a moral episode. The Rashidun chapter on Uthman follows him, including his argument that the pious rallying-cry was a cloak for material grievance.
1 citation · 1 chapterFriedrich Hirth, China and the Roman Orient: Researches into their Ancient and Mediaeval Relations as Represented in Old Chinese Records (Georg Hirth, Leipzig and Munich, 1885)
hirth-1885A sinologist in the Chinese customs service who collected and translated every notice of the Roman east — Da Qin, later Fulin — in the Chinese histories from the Hou Han Shu to Ma Duanlin, printed the Chinese text beside the translation, and argued out what each place-name meant. The translations are the reason to use it: they are the Chinese record of the western world in the words the Chinese used. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterRobert G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam, in Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 13 (Darwin Press, 1997)
hoyland-1997The survey of roughly 120 non-Muslim texts bearing on the first century and a half of Islam. Used for the Rashidun chapter on the evidence, which is the one place this site says plainly that its most important polity is reconstructed from sources written a century and more after the events, and what independent contemporaries do and do not confirm.
1 citation · 1 chapterA. F. P. Hulsewé (translator), with an introduction by M. A. N. Loewe, China in Central Asia: The Early Stage, 125 BC - AD 23; an annotated translation of chapters 61 and 96 of the History of the Former Han Dynasty (E. J. Brill, 1979)
hulsewe-1979A fully annotated translation of the Han shu's own Western Regions chapters. Cited for its record of Lao-shang chanyu's completion of what Modu had begun against the Yuezhi - killing their king and driving the survivors past Dayuan into Bactria - the event that actually finished the migration Modu only started.
1 citation · 1 chapterIbn Abd al-Hakam, History of the Conquest of Spain (Williams and Norgate, 1858)
ibn-abd-al-hakam-jonesThe earliest Arabic narrative of the conquest of Spain, by an Egyptian writing in the ninth century, and therefore the closest thing to a near-contemporary account that survives on the Muslim side. It is a transmission of traditions rather than a chronicle and it carries folklore alongside campaign detail — the padlocked house at Toledo sits in the same sequence as the crossing — so it is used here with the seams left visible. Jones's apparatus is part of its value: his note on Ilyan sets out the argument, still live, over whether the man existed at all. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterInternational Crisis Group, Southern Thailand: Insurgency, Not Jihad (Asia Report N°98, 2005)
icg-2005-southern-thailandPublished 18 May 2005, covering the 4 January 2004 army-depot raid that opened the current wave of violence, the 28 April 2004 Kru Se Mosque killings and the 25 October 2004 Tak Bai deaths, and the political and religious background - Haji Sulong's 1940s movement, the Barisan Revolusi Nasional and Patani United Liberation Organisation - against which the report assesses whether the violence amounts to a jihadist campaign or a nationalist insurgency. Freely published.
1 citation · 1 chapterCaterino Zeno, Josafa Barbaro, Ambrogio Contarini, Vincentio d'Alessandri and others, A Narrative of Italian Travels in Persia in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Hakluyt Society, 1873)
italian-travels-greySix Venetian reports on Iran, written by envoys and merchants sent to find an ally against the Ottomans and to see whether one was worth having. They are commercial and military intelligence rather than travel writing, which is why they record revenues, troop numbers, how justice was actually administered and how long a foreigner was kept waiting. D'Alessandri's report of 1571 is the only close description of Shah Tahmasp late in his reign by anyone who was in the country. The Venetians confuse Persian names constantly and Grey's notes correct some and not others. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterJohn, Bishop of Nikiu, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu (Text and Translation Society, 1916)
john-of-nikiuA Coptic bishop of the Egyptian Delta writing within living memory of the Arab conquest of Egypt, and the only substantial narrative of it from the side that lost. Surviving in an Ethiopic version made from an Arabic version of the Coptic or Greek original, which is a long chain and is why its dates are unreliable and some place-names are corrupt. Its value is not chronological: it is that a contemporary Egyptian reports the conquest as sack, flight and taxation rather than as a transfer of administration, and reports his own community's view that Heraclius had brought it on the Romans by persecuting them. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterR.M. Johnston, The Napoleonic Empire in Southern Italy and the Rise of the Secret Societies (1904)
johnston-1904A two-volume history covering Marshal Masséna's 1806 invasion and Joseph Bonaparte's entry into Naples, the Napoleonic decade under Joseph and then Joachim Murat, and the 1815 Bourbon Restoration itself, including the Austro-Sicilian treaty and the Convention of Casa Lanza that ended Murat's own reign. Public domain, open access via archive.org (two separately scanned volumes).
1 citationMirza Mahdi Khan Astarabadi, The History of the Life of Nader Shah, King of Persia (J. Richardson, 1773)
jones-naderNader's own secretary and official historian, writing the *Tarikh-i Nadiri* while the events were current, translated into French for the king of Denmark and then into English by Jones, who was twenty-six and had been handed the manuscript because nobody else could read it. It is a court history and says so: the campaigns are triumphs, the massacres are necessities, and the failures are other people's. What makes it worth reading anyway is that Mirza Mahdi was present for a great deal of it and records the mechanics — how a defeated army was paid back into confidence, what a review looked like, which general refused to come out of his entrenchments — with a staff officer's attention. Jones's own footnotes argue with his author from time to time. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterAnonymous Qajar court historian, The Dynasty of the Kajars, Translated from the Original Persian Manuscript Presented by His Majesty Fath Ali Shah to Sir Harford Jones Brydges (John Bohn, 1833)
kajars-brydgesThe Qajar dynasty's own account of itself, written at court and handed by the reigning shah to a departing British envoy as a gift — which means it is a primary source for what the dynasty wanted a foreign government to know about it. The rhetoric is unbroken panegyric, and the reason it is worth reading is that the panegyric does not exclude the atrocities: the storming of Kerman and the order that its inhabitants perish by the sword are set down as accomplishments, in the same register as the recovery of the crown jewels. Brydges translates closely and adds a long introduction of his own that disagrees with his text in places. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterDosabhai Framji Karaka, History of the Parsis, including their manners, customs, religion and present position (Macmillan, 1884)
karaka-1884Written by a Parsi member of the Bombay legislative council for a Victorian readership, and partisan about its own community in the way that implies. Its value is that it prints and discusses the Qissa-i Sanjan, the only substantial account of the migration to Gujarat, which was composed in 1600 — some nine hundred years after the events — and that Karaka is candid about its chronology: he sets out in a footnote why the traditional date of 716 does not reconcile with the Hindu and Parsi dates given, and concludes that the first and later emigrations have been confused. Cited here with that provenance stated. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterHugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007)
kennedy-2007Used for the second wave of conquest under al-Walid I — Transoxiana, Sind and al-Andalus in the same decade — which is the campaign that produced this site's second-largest reach figure and which the Umayyad page had no chapter for.
1 citation · 1 chapterL. W. King, Babylonian Boundary-Stones and Memorial-Tablets in the British Museum (British Museum, 1912)
king-1912The kudurru corpus: Babylonian charters recording grants of land and exemptions, carved on shaped stones under the emblems of the gods who guaranteed them. Their historical value is accidental and therefore unusually high — a charter has to justify the grant, so it opens with what the grantee did to earn it, and the campaign narratives embedded in these preambles are often the only account of the events they describe. King gives each stone in transliteration and translation with the damaged signs argued over in the notes. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterLeonard William King, The Letters and Inscriptions of Hammurabi, King of Babylon, Volume III (Luzac, 1900)
king-hammurabiThe cuneiform texts, transliterations and translations of Hammurabi's own administrative correspondence — most of it addressed to Sin-idinnam, governor of Larsa — with a long introduction classifying what the king wrote to his governors about. It is the ordinary paperwork of the man whose law collection is the most famous document of the ancient world, and it is out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterSamuel Noah Kramer, Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur (University of Chicago Press, 1940)
kramer-1940The first full edition and translation of the Sumerian lament for the fall of Ur, assembled from twenty-two tablets and fragments, with a prose summary of each of the poem's eleven "songs" preceding the line-by-line translation. The summary is what is used here: the translation itself is printed with the philological apparatus interleaved and with gaps marked in every second line, which is honest about the state of the text and makes it hard to quote. Published as Assyriological Studies 12 and made freely available by the Oriental Institute.
1 citation · 1 chapterLiliuokalani, Queen of Hawaii, Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen (Lee and Shepard, 1898)
liliuokalani-1898The deposed queen's own memoir, written and published within five years of her overthrow. Used here for her own account of the January 1893 crisis and her actions and state of mind during it, alongside alexander-1899's outside narrative of the same events. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterSimon de la Loubère, A New Historical Relation of the Kingdom of Siam (Tho. Horne, 1693)
loubere-1693The report of Louis XIV's envoy extraordinary to Ayutthaya, who spent three months there in 1687-88 and left just before the revolution that expelled the French. He is systematic and sceptical, checks figures where he can, and says when he could not — but he saw a court under a Greek-born favourite in the last months of a reign, was managed throughout, and never went outside the capital's orbit. The 1693 English is used here. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterPiotr Michalowski, History as Charter: Some Observations on the Sumerian King List, in Journal of the American Oriental Society (1983)
michalowski-1983The argument that the Sumerian King List, in the form it survives, is an Isin-court composition: a single line of legitimate kingship handed down from city to city since the beginning of history, compiled at a moment when Isin's own dynasty needed exactly that kind of unbroken chain to stand at the end of. Cited here for that argument specifically, not for the list's contents, which are cited elsewhere from the editions that print the text itself.
1 citation · 1 chapterAli Haydar Midhat, The Life of Midhat Pasha: A Record of His Services, Political Reforms, Banishment, and Judicial Murder, Derived from Private Documents and Reminiscences (John Murray, London, 1903)
midhat-1903A biography of the architect of the 1864 provincial law and the 1876 constitution, written by his son from Midhat's own papers and the reminiscences of men who served under him — an insider's account rather than a disinterested one, and it reads in places as a brief for the defence of a father judicially murdered by Abdulhamid II in 1884. Used here for the administrative detail of the Danube vilayet reforms, which the son had the documents to give in specifics: council structures, road and bridge counts, the schools project and how it was killed. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterVladimir Minorsky, Jihan-shah Qara-qoyunlu and his Poetry (Turkmenica 9), in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (1954)
minorsky-1954Edits a selection of Jahan Shah's divan from manuscript and discusses the Azerbaijani Turkic he wrote it in. Cited because this site's page had asserted that a Kara Koyunlu ruler wrote Turkic poetry under a pen-name on the authority of a genealogical manual, which does not carry the claim.
1 citation · 1 chapterNaosuke Mukoyama, Oil in the Imperial Periphery (Phenomenal World, 2025)
mukoyama-2025Published 13 February 2025, drawing on the author's book "Fueling Sovereignty." Cited for the 1929 Seria oil strike and its effect on British colonial policy toward Brunei (including the 1906 treaty guaranteeing no further cession of Bruneian territory), the 1962 Brunei revolt against the proposed merger into the Malaysian Federation over control of oil revenue, and the path to independence in 1984. Freely published.
1 citation · 1 chapterTheodor Noldeke, Sketches from Eastern History (Adam and Charles Black, 1892)
noldeke-1892Essays by the founder of modern critical Arabic and Iranian philology, including "A Servile War in the East", still the fullest account of the Zanj revolt available in English outside the copyrighted translations of Tabari, whose narrative it follows closely and cites throughout. Noldeke is explicit that Tabari writes from the government side and calls the rebel leader the abominable one, and he weighs the sources against each other rather than paraphrasing them. His nineteenth-century vocabulary for African people is of its period and is not reproduced here. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterNotker the Stammerer, De Carolo Magno, in Early Lives of Charlemagne (Chatto and Windus, 1907)
notker-grantA monk of St Gall writing about Charlemagne for Charles the Fat, some seventy years after the emperor's death and within a few years of the collapse of the empire. It is not a biography in Einhard's sense: it is a collection of anecdotes, several of them plainly drawn from songs already in circulation, addressed flatteringly to a living descendant. Its value is that it catches the legend at the moment of formation — half a century after the man died, and while people who had fought under him were still alive to be talked to. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterDimitri Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe 500-1453, in History of Civilization (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971)
obolensky-1971The book that coined the phrase this site's Balkan and Rus material keeps needing: a cultural and religious sphere held together by liturgy, script and a shared idea of empire rather than by any polity's authority. Cited here for what went out of Bulgaria to Serbia and the Rus, which is the substance of the First Bulgarian record's one influence count.
1 citation · 1 chapterJuan de Palafox y Mendoza, The History of the Conquest of China by the Tartars (Hakluyt Society, 1854)
palafox-tartarA Spanish bishop's account of the fall of the Ming and the Manchu conquest, written in the 1650s from reports reaching Mexico and Manila while the war was still being fought. It is close to the events and remote from the country: Palafox is working from missionary letters and merchant hearsay, names are mangled through several languages, and the providential framing is his own. Cited here for what the fall looked like to outsiders watching it happen. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterMatthew Paris, Matthew Paris's English History, from the Year 1235 to 1273 (Henry G. Bohn, London, 1852)
paris-gilesThe chronicle of St Albans, written by a monk who never travelled further than London and who collected everything that reached him — royal letters, travellers' reports, market prices, rumour. For the Mongols he is worthless as description and invaluable as evidence: he records what Europe was told between 1238 and 1245, in what order, by whom, and how it was received, including the price of herring at Yarmouth and the bishop of Winchester's reply to a Muslim embassy asking for help. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterEdwin Pears, The Destruction of the Greek Empire and the Story of the Capture of Constantinople by the Turks (Longmans, Green, 1903)
pears-1903A British barrister who lived in Constantinople for forty years and read the Greek, Italian and Turkish accounts against each other. He is thorough on the sources and closely translated from Kritovoulos and Sphrantzes, which is what he is used for here. His interpretative chapters are Victorian in the worst sense — sweeping judgements about races and churches — and are not borrowed from. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterGaleote Pereira, Certain Reports of the Province China, in Reprinted in the introduction to Mendoza's History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China, Hakluyt Society (Hakluyt Society, 1853)
pereira-edenA Portuguese trader captured smuggling on the Fujian coast in 1549 and held with his companions in Chinese custody, under sentence and then as a registered resident, for several years before he got home. His account of it was printed in Portuguese in 1565, translated into English by Richard Willes for Richard Eden's Historye of Trauayle in 1577, and reprinted at length in the Hakluyt Society's Mendoza. He writes as a prisoner reporting on the system that held him — the whipping he watched, the almshouses he was startled to find, the post that outran his own captivity — and he has no reason to flatter any of it. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterW. M. Flinders Petrie, Syria and Egypt from the Tell el Amarna Letters (Methuen, 1898)
petrie-1898A letter-by-letter walk through the Amarna correspondence, with each tablet summarised in order and the references to the editions given, by the excavator who had dug at Amarna a few years earlier. What it is used for here is the content of the letters, which has not changed: who wrote to whom, what they asked for and what they complained of. Petrie's surrounding history has not aged as well — his chronology is his own, and his identification of Tadukhipa with Nefertiti is not now accepted — so his inferences are attributed to him where they are used and are not passed off as settled. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterPhotius of Constantinople, The Library of Photius, Volume I (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1920)
photius-freeseA ninth-century patriarch's reading notes on some three hundred books, many of them now lost, summarised at whatever length he thought each deserved. For several works his summary is all that survives — among them the history of Nonnosus, a sixth-century Byzantine envoy to the Arabs, Aksum and Himyar. Photius compresses, occasionally editorialises, and sometimes dismisses a stretch of his author as fabulous without saying what was in it, so what reaches us is a digest of a digest. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterPliny the Elder, The Natural History of Pliny, Volume III (Books XII-XVII) (Henry G. Bohn, 1855)
pliny-bostockBook XII contains the fullest ancient account of the frankincense trade — where the trees grow, who is allowed to harvest them, what is taken at each stage of the road to the Mediterranean and what a pound costs at the end. Pliny is compiling from other men's reports and from Roman customs figures rather than from travel, and he has a case to make: that the luxury trade is draining the empire. The numbers are therefore worth treating as Roman accounting rather than Arabian, which is precisely what makes them usable. Bostock and Riley annotate heavily and flag the readings they doubt. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterAlfred Rambaud, History of Russia, from the Earliest Times to 1880, Volume I (Estes and Lauriat, 1879)
rambaud-russia-v1-1879A standard nineteenth-century French history of Russia, in English translation, covering the Kievan and appanage periods. Used here for its account of Andrei Bogoliubsky, prince of Suzdal (1157-1174), a new type of ambitious, autocratic ruler in Russian politics who preferred to build up Suzdal and Vladimir rather than compete for the throne of a Kiev he came to regard with contempt, and who is credited with "a glorious campaign against the Bulgarians" - the Volga Bulgars - that raised his reputation across Russia. The source does not give a precise year for the campaign beyond placing it within his reign, before his 1169 sack of Kiev. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterAnthony Reid, The Contest for North Sumatra: Atjeh, the Netherlands and Britain, 1858-1898 (Oxford University Press / University of Malaya Press, 1969) link
reid-1969Scanned in full and readable at the URL. Its introduction carries the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Aceh — the decline of the sultanate into a symbol, the rise of the uleebalang as hereditary territorial chiefs, the pepper coast, Penang, and the Anglo-Dutch treaties — which is the period the Acehnese chapters here previously jumped over. Reid's own preface is candid about the evidence: no Atjehnese state records have ever been found, so the Acehnese view survives directly only in a few popular epics, and the account rests on British and Dutch documents.
1 citation · 1 chapterAnthony Reid, Sixteenth Century Turkish Influence in Western Indonesia, in Journal of Southeast Asian History (1969) link
reid-1969bReid sets the Turkish, Acehnese and Portuguese accounts of the embassy side by side and shows how far they disagree. His most useful observation for this site is that the strongest version of the story — Aceh submitting as a vassal — is a late Turkish retelling, and that the reading of the mission as tribute rather than alliance "may owe something to the events of 1873, when the Atjehnese attempted to portray their country as under Turkish suzerainty."
1 citation · 1 chapterAnthony Reid (ed.), Verandah of Violence: The Background to the Aceh Problem (Singapore University Press / NUS Press, 2006) link
reid-2006Scanned in full and readable at the URL. Carries Aceh from the sultanate to the 2005 Helsinki settlement, with a dated chronology and chapters by M. Isa Sulaiman on the destruction of the uleebalang and the origins of Acehnese nationalism, and by Edward Aspinall on violence and identity under Indonesian rule. The source for what happened to Aceh after 1903.
1 citation · 1 chapterT. W. Rhys Davids, The Questions of King Milinda (Clarendon Press, 1890)
rhys-davids-1890A translation of the Pali Milinda-panha with a long introduction on the identification of Milinda with the Greek king Menander. Its value here is that introduction, which assembles in one place every surviving classical notice of Menander — four of them — alongside the numismatic evidence, and is unusually careful about what the material will and will not support: it accepts that the coin epithets show Buddhist subjects, denies that they show a Buddhist king, and treats the text's own account of Menander's conversion as a literary ending rather than a historical report. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterMohd Roslan Mohd Noor and Ahmad Dahlan, The Activism and Survival of the Riau Lingga 'Ulama', in Journal of Indonesian Islam, vol. 12 no. 1 (2018)
riau-lingga-ulama-2018Built on archival letters and contracts held at the Indonesian National Archives (ANRI), covering the court scholars and officials around Raja Ali Kelana who pressed Sultan Abdul Rahman Muazzam Shah toward resisting Dutch demands - the flag disputes of 1904-1909, the 1905 political contract, the refused 1910 renegotiation, and the 10 February 1911 Dutch decree terminating the sultan's own recognition. Open access.
1 citation · 1 chapterAmeen Rihani, Arabian Peak and Desert: Travels in al-Yaman (Constable, 1930)
rihani-1930A Lebanese-American writer who travelled through Yemen in 1922 and was received by Imam Yahya at Sana'a, four years after the Ottoman withdrawal and while the imamate was governing an independent country. He is a partisan of Arab self-rule and says so, which is why the book is worth reading: he admires the imam and still records the hostage system, the retained Ottoman officers, the uncultivated land and the sectarian war against the Shafi'is of the Tihama, and argues with his own subject about all of it. His figures come from what he was told on the road and should be read as such. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterThomas Ripper, Die Marwaniden von Diyar Bakr: eine kurdische Dynastie im islamischen Mittelalter, in Mitteilungen zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der islamischen Welt (Ergon Verlag, 2000)
ripper-2000The only monograph on the Marwanids, in German, and cited here for the one argument this site takes from it directly: that the eleventh-century emirate began the westward Kurdish settlement that made Diyar Bakr a Kurdish country. The narrative chapters on that page are drafted from kennedy-2004, which is what this site could actually read against.
1 citation · 1 chapterAlphonse Rousseau, Annales tunisiennes, ou aperçu historique sur la régence de Tunis (Bastide, Algiers, 1864)
rousseau-1864A French consular interpreter's history of Ottoman Tunis, compiled from the Tunisian chroniclers Ibn Abi Dinar, al-Wazir and Hajj Husayn Khoja, whom he names as he goes. Cited here for the Ottoman capture of Tunis and the administration Sinan Pasha left behind it. Written in Algiers under the French occupation by a man in the service of it, and the contempt for what he is describing is on the surface rather than hidden; his figures come from his chroniclers and he prints the ones that disagree. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterMohd Hazmi bin Mohd Rusli and Muhamad Azim bin Mazlan, Sultan of Sulu's Sabah Claim: A Case of 'Long-Lost' Sovereignty? (RSIS Commentaries No. 043/2013, 2013)
rsis-2013-sabahPublished 12 March 2013, in the middle of the Lahad Datu crisis it analyses. Cited here for the 1878 North Borneo agreement's terms (Alfred Dent and Baron von Overbeck of the British North Borneo Company, 5,000 Malayan dollars a year), the annual cession payment Malaysia still makes to the Sulu sultan's heirs, the 1963 accession of North Borneo to Malaysia as Sabah, and the February-March 2013 occupation of Lahad Datu by armed followers of Jamalul Kiram III. Freely published.
1 citation · 1 chapterWilliam of Rubruck, The Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World, 1253-55 (Hakluyt Society, 1900)
rubruck-rockhillA Flemish Franciscan sent east by Louis IX, who reached Mongke Khan's court at Karakorum and wrote the fullest eyewitness description of the Mongol empire at its height by anyone from outside it. He is unusually good precisely because he was unimpressed: he counts, measures, asks what things cost, refuses the mare's milk, and reports his own humiliations. He is also a missionary who failed, and his judgements on Nestorians, Buddhists and Muslims are those of a man who lost arguments with all three. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterJalal al-Din Rumi, Selected Poems from the Divani Shamsi Tabriz (Cambridge University Press, 1898)
rumi-nicholson-1898Nicholson's first book, with the Persian and the English facing and a commentary he later thought too free. The poems are the ghazals Rumi wrote under the name of Shams of Tabriz, at Konya, in the decades on either side of the Mongol conquest of the sultanate. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterJanina M. Safran, Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Islamic Iberia (Cornell University Press, 2013)
safran-2013Reads the ninth- and tenth-century Andalusi jurists on the practical problem of keeping communal boundaries legible in a society where conversion, intermarriage and a shared language kept dissolving them. Cited for the Cordoba chapter on the three communities, which is deliberately not a chapter about tolerance — and it is the second work cited on that page, which until now rested entirely on one book.
1 citation · 1 chapterP. H. Sawyer, Kings and Vikings: Scandinavia and Europe A.D. 700-1100 (1982)
sawyer-1982A synthesis of Scandinavian settlement across the North Sea world, covering the social and administrative afterlife of the Danelaw in particular - the free peasantry attested by Domesday Book, the fragmentation of old estates into small manors and parishes across Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, and the place-name evidence bearing on how, and by whom, Scandinavian settlement changed landholding. Open access via archive.org (Community Texts).
1 citation · 1 chapterSerbian oral tradition, Serbian Ballads (Published for the Kossovo Day Committee, 1916)
seton-watson-balladsA threepenny pamphlet of the Kosovo and Marko Kraljević cycles, translated by a historian of the Habsburg lands and issued in London in June 1916 by a committee organising a British commemoration of the battle's five hundred and twenty-seventh anniversary while Serbia was under occupation. The ballads are centuries of oral tradition rather than evidence about 1389; the pamphlet itself is evidence about 1916, which is why it is used here. Seton-Watson says frankly that they are untranslatable and that he has aimed at something recitable. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterNicolai Sinai, The Qur'an: A Historical-Critical Introduction, in The New Edinburgh Islamic Surveys (Edinburgh University Press, 2017)
sinai-2017Used for the Uthmanic standardisation of the Qur'anic text: the traditional account of the committee and the copies sent to the garrison towns, and what the early manuscript evidence does and does not settle. Cited for a chapter that is about a state act and its distribution network, not about scripture.
1 citation · 1 chapterXuanzang, Si-yu-ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World (Trubner, 1884)
siyuki-bealThe record a Chinese monk made of the countries he passed through between 629 and 645, on a journey to India he began by leaving the empire against an imperial prohibition and ended by being received at court. He is describing the Western Regions in the decade the Tang was taking them, and he is exact about what a town contained and how far it was to the next one. He is also a pilgrim: the length of an entry tracks the number of monasteries rather than the size of the place, and the miracle stories are reported as he was told them. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterAdolphus Slade, Records of Travels in Turkey, Greece, &c., and of a Cruise in the Black Sea with the Capitan Pacha (Saunders and Otley, London, 1854)
slade-1854A British naval officer who arrived in 1829, during the Russian war, went to sea with the Ottoman fleet and later served in it for seventeen years. He is the closest thing to an embedded observer of Mahmud II's new army in its first years, three years after the destruction of the janissaries. He is opinionated, hostile to Russia, condescending about almost everyone, and convinced the reforms were being done the wrong way — which is why he records the detail that supports the case, and why the detail has to be read as evidence for a thesis he already held. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterStaatliche Museen zu Berlin, Return of Benin Bronzes from the Ethnologisches Museum (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2022)
smb-benin-return-2022The museum's own account of the August 2022 transfer of ownership of 512 Benin objects to Nigeria - the largest transfer of ownership of museum objects from a colonial context to date - and the ten-year loan arrangement keeping roughly a third of them on display in Berlin. Open access via smb.museum.
1 citation · 1 chapterSmbat Sparapet, Chronicle (Sources of the Armenian Tradition, 2005)
smbat-bedrosianThe constable of Cilician Armenia and elder brother of King Het'um I, who knew Latin, Greek and Turkish, translated the kingdom's law code, and went to the Mongol court himself in 1248; the translation is in the public domain by the translator's gift. The chronicle is annalistic and domestic — deaths, marriages, harvests and raids entered year by year — and its value is that the man writing it was in the room for a good deal of what he records and had no reason to explain the kingdom to anybody, so he does not.
1 citation · 1 chapterSpenser St John, Life in the Forests of the Far East, or Travels in Northern Borneo, 2nd, revised edn (Smith, Elder and Co., 1863) link
st-john-1863St John was Britain's consul-general in Borneo and an ally of James Brooke, and his twelfth chapter, "The Kingdom of Borneo Proper", is the fullest contemporary description of the Brunei government there is. It is also a brief. His account of Brunei's misrule was written while Britain and the Brookes were acquiring the sultanate's territory, and it argues for exactly the conclusion that acquisition needed. Read it for the detail — the offices and their holders, the parishes and their trades, the numbers — and read the judgements as an interested party's.
1 citation · 1 chapterStrabo, The Geography of Strabo, Volume III (Henry G. Bohn, 1857)
strabo-hamiltonWritten in the reign of Augustus by a Greek who had travelled some of what he describes and read everything else. Book XVI carries the fullest surviving account of the Nabataeans, much of it second-hand from Athenodorus, a philosopher friend of Strabo's who had lived at Petra, and the fullest account of the Roman expedition into Arabia under Aelius Gallus, which Strabo had from Gallus himself. He is therefore reporting a failed campaign in the words of the man who failed, and the explanation offered — that a Nabataean minister sabotaged it — should be read with that in mind. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterStrabo (translated by Hans Claude Hamilton and William Falconer), The Geography of Strabo (Henry G. Bohn, 1856)
strabo-hamilton-falconer-1856An English translation of Strabo's Geography, whose account of Mauretania (Book XVII) was written and revised across the last years of the author's own life. Used here for its statement that Juba, "having received [the kingdom] from Augustus Caesar, in addition to his paternal dominions," ruled until he "died lately, and was succeeded by his son Ptolemy, whose mother was the daughter of Antony and Cleopatra" - confirming the succession from Juba II to Ptolemy directly, though without giving an exact year for Juba's own death; a translator's note places it no later than AD 18 or 19, while flagging the precise date as uncertain. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterMuhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, Volume XXII: The Marwanid Restoration (State University of New York Press, 1989)
tabari-22-rowsonContinues the chronicle into 74-81/693-701, covering al-Hajjaj's governorship of Iraq after Mecca fell: the Kharijite Shabib b. Yazid, who held out with a few hundred men and twice entered al-Kufah itself, and the beginning of the unrest that grew into Ibn al-Ash'ath's revolt. Used here for what holding the province actually required once the war over the caliphate was already won elsewhere.
1 citation · 1 chapterPero Tafur, Travels and Adventures, 1435-1439 (George Routledge, 1926)
tafur-lettsA Castilian gentleman who travelled the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea for his own curiosity, met most of the rulers in it, and wrote the journey up years later for a readership at home. He is boastful and his chronology slips, but he was received at courts a merchant would not have entered and he repeats conversations. Used here for Trebizond in 1438, where his testimony fixes a date historians had wrong. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterNasir-i Khusraw, trans. W. M. Thackston, Jr., Naser-e Khosraw's Book of Travels (Safarnama), in Persian Heritage Series 36 (Bibliotheca Persica, 1986)
thackston-1986The eleventh-century traveller's own account, in translation. Cited so that the description of al-Hasa on this site's Qarmatian page — the untaxed residents, the state granaries, the interest-free loans, the mosque with no Friday prayer — is attributed to the man who wrote it rather than to a modern survey quoting him. He was an Isma'ili himself, which is a reason to cite him directly and to say so.
1 citation · 1 chapterRomila Thapar, Somanatha: The Many Voices of a History (Penguin, 2004)
thapar-2004Reconstructs the raid of 1026 and, more to the point, what was subsequently made of it — from Sanskrit inscriptions, merchant and royal biographies, court epics and popular narrative, set against the Persian and Arabic accounts. Cited for the Ghaznavid chapter on the Indian campaigns, because the afterlife of that event is a larger historical object than the event.
1 citation · 1 chapterCyrus Thomas, Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology (Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of Ethnology (Twelfth Annual Report), 1894)
thomas-mound-explorations-1894A federal archaeological survey arguing, against the then-popular "lost race" theory of mound-building, that the earthworks of the Mississippi valley were built by the ancestors of historic Indian nations. Cited here for its survey of the Cahokia mound group in Illinois and its use of documented Natchez mound-building customs - building a fresh mound for each new Great Sun's residence - as direct evidence for that argument.
1 citation · 1 chapterGeorge Macaulay Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Making of Italy: June-November 1860 (Longmans, Green and Co., 1911)
trevelyan-1911The third volume of Trevelyan's Garibaldi trilogy, covering the landing in Calabria through the crossing to the mainland, the entry into Naples on 7 September 1860, the Volturno campaign, and Victor Emmanuel's own entry into Naples on 7 November. Drawn from contemporary letters, diaries and Italian-language memoirs Trevelyan collated himself. Open access via archive.org.
1 citation · 1 chapterG. M. Trevelyan, Manin and the Venetian Revolution of 1848 (Longmans, Green, 1923)
trevelyan-1923Trevelyan wrote it as the third of his Italian Risorgimento books and it is frankly a partisan's account, warm about Manin and cold about Austria. Its value here is the documentary work behind it: he read the Venetian municipal archive, the diaries and the Austrian side, and he cites them line by line, so the detail can be used even where the verdicts cannot. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterGiuseppe Tucci, Tibetan Painted Scrolls, Volume I (La Libreria dello Stato, Rome, 1949)
tucci-1949-painted-scrollsA study of Tibetan religious painting that opens with a detailed reconstruction, from the Yuan shih's own official list, of the succession of Ti shih - Imperial Preceptors - who held the Sakya throne's link to the Mongol court after Phagpa. Cited for the unbroken run of appointments from 1280 to 1330 and the interruption when a non-Sakya chaplain filled the seat during an internal exile.
1 citation · 1 chapterUsama ibn Munqidh, An Arab-Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the Period of the Crusades (Kitab al-I'tibar) (Columbia University Press, 1929)
usama-hittiThe memoirs of a Syrian nobleman of Shayzar who spent his long life among the Franks as neighbour, enemy, guest and occasional ally, written in old age as a book of instruction and full of anecdotes he found funny, alarming or instructive. It is the closest thing to an ordinary Muslim view of the crusader states from inside them, and it is unusually careful to distinguish what its author saw himself from what he was told. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterAbu Nasr al-Utbi, The Kitab-i-Yamini: Historical Memoirs of the Amir Sabaktagin and the Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna (Oriental Translation Fund, 1858)
utbi-reynoldsA secretary in Ghaznavid service writing about his own employers, in rhymed Arabic prose so ornamented that the translator complains about it in the preface and the reader has to work to get the event out of the sentence. It is a panegyric and makes no pretence otherwise: Indian kings are "the accursed", every Ghaznavid decision is generous, and victory is always the fulfilment of a Qur'anic promise. What makes it indispensable anyway is that al-Utbi was there or knew the men who were, and that he records the terms of treaties, the composition of armies and the arguments inside the Ghaznavid camp, including the ones his patrons lost. Reynolds translated the Persian version rather than the Arabic original. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterPaul E. Walker, Caliph of Cairo: Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, 996-1021 (American University in Cairo Press, 2009)
walker-2009The full-length study of the Fatimid caliph the sources cannot agree about. Used because the chapter drafted from it is as much about the historiography as about the reign: Walker's point that the mad tyrant and the divinely ordained imam are two constituencies' portraits of the same man is the reason this site declines to pick one.
1 citation · 1 chapterEdward Scott Waring, A Tour to Sheeraz, by the Route of Kazroon and Feerozabad; with Various Remarks on the Manners, Customs, Laws, Language and Literature of the Persians, to which is added a History of Persia from the Death of Nadir Shah to the Present Time (T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1807)
waring-1807A Company servant who spent 1802 in Shiraz and appended to his travel book a history of the Zands built from two Persian manuscripts he had acquired — one written under the Qajars, one by a man who had been secretary to a grandson of Karim Khan's brother and was present for much of what he describes. Waring says plainly in his introduction what is wrong with each: a historian writing under a reigning dynasty will flatter and lie, and a historian attached to the losing family will credit to fortune what was really foresight, and his method is to play one against the other. He footnotes where his two texts disagree and where both disagree with Francklin. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterRobert Grant Watson, A History of Persia from the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century to the Year 1858 (Smith, Elder and Co., 1866)
watson-1866Written by a member of the British legation at Tehran from the legation's papers and from people who had been in the room, and for a century the only connected English account of the period. Watson is a Victorian liberal with a theory — he cites Buckle to the effect that a people makes its own government and no government can force progress on an unsound one — and that theory shapes his verdicts, particularly on why reform failed. The narrative underneath it is close, dated and specific, and he names his informants often enough that a reader can see where the detail comes from. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterJ. R. Wellsted, Travels in Arabia, Volume I (John Murray, 1838)
wellsted-1838A lieutenant of the Indian Navy who surveyed the Omani coast and travelled inland in the 1830s, during Sayyid Said's reign. He writes as a naval officer assessing an ally: what the harbour would take to fortify, how many guns the frigates carry, how long a squadron from India would need to arrive. The book's anxieties are imperial — much of the Oman chapter is about what Russia might do — and that is exactly what makes his estimate of Omani strength worth having, since he had no motive to inflate it. Out of copyright.
1 citation · 1 chapterColonel G. F. Young, The Medici (1909)
young-1909A two-volume family history, first published 1909 and drawing on Varchi, Davanzati and other contemporary Florentine sources for the end of the Republic: the ten months of Baccio Valori's proxy rule, Alessandro's installation and the 1 May 1532 abolition of the Signoria, and Cosimo I's own steady conversion of the ducal title into a hereditary Grand Duchy, confirmed by papal bull in 1569. Open access via archive.org.
1 citation · 1 chapter
Listed but uncited
These are in sources.yaml and no source: field resolves to them. That is worth showing rather than hiding: an unused entry is either a work someone meant to draft from and did not, or a leftover, and both are easier to fix when visible.
- Ángel Barrios García, Repoblación de la zona meridional del Duero: Fases de ocupación, procedencias y distribución espacial de los grupos repobladores, in Studia Historica. Historia Medieval, III (1985)barrios-1985
- Dauvit Broun, Statehood and lordship in 'Scotland' before the mid-twelfth century, in The Innes Review, vol. 66, no. 1 (2015)broun-2015
- Commission des sciences et arts d'Égypte, Description de l'Égypte, ou recueil des observations et des recherches qui ont été faites en Égypte pendant l'expédition de l'armée française, in Antiquités, vol. IV (Imprimerie impériale, 1821)description-egypte
- Eugène Grébaut, Le Musée Égyptien: recueil de monuments et de notices sur les fouilles d'Égypte, in Volume I (Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale, 1890)grebaut-1890
- Linda M. Heywood, Slavery and Its Transformation in the Kingdom of Kongo: 1491-1800, in Journal of African History, vol. 50 no. 1 (2009)heywood-2009
- William H. Isbell and Antti Korpisaari, Burial in the Wari and the Tiwanaku Heartlands: Similarities, Differences, and Meanings, in Diálogo Andino, no. 39 (2012)isbell-korpisaari-2012
- Kartlis Tskhovreba: A History of Georgia (Artanuji, 2014)kartlis-tskhovreba
- Sheikh As-Sultan Muhammadu Sa'adu Abubakar III (The Muslim 500, 2024)muslim500-abubakar-profile
- W. M. Flinders Petrie, The Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty, 1900-1901, in Egypt Exploration Fund, Memoirs 18 and 21 (Egypt Exploration Fund, 1901)petrie-1901
- J. H. Round, Geoffrey de Mandeville: A Study of the Anarchy (1892)round-1892
- J. H. Round, Feudal England: Historical Studies on the XIth and XIIth Centuries (1895)round-1895
- The Union of 1707: The Historical Context, in Scottish History Society learning resource (2016)shs-union-2016
- J.C.L. Sismondi, History of the Italian Republics in the Middle Ages (1906)sismondi-1906
- Union with Scotland Act 1706, in legislation.gov.uk (1706)union-1706-statute
- John Wreglesworth, The Chronicle of Alfonso III and Its Significance for the Historiography of the Asturian Kingdom, 718-910 AD, in PhD thesis, University of Leeds (1995)wreglesworth-1995
Datasets
Consumed by the map layer through basemap-links.yaml rather than by a source: field, so they carry no citation count. They are never a source for a measure — hard rule 5.
- Ed Chalstrey, James Bennett and the Seshat Global History Databank, Cliopatria: a geospatial database of world-wide political entities from 3400BCE to 2024CE, v0.2.0, doi:10.5281/zenodo.20274630 edn (2026)CC-BY-4.0
- Andre Ourednik and contributors, historical-basemaps: Historical country boundary GeoJSONCC-BY-4.0
- Natural Earth contributors, Natural Earth 1:50m LandPublic domain